Going Wi-Fi: A Practical Guide to Planning and Building an 802.11 Network

The 802.11n Task Group is working on a high-speed variant of the existing 802.11 standards. This revision of the 802.11 specifications would double the speed of existing 802.11 standards. The body working on this standard is called the "High Throughput Study Group."

This group is trying to increase the "throughput" of 802.11, i.e. the actual amount of data that is transferred over a wireless link in a set period of time, rather than just upping the data transfer rates. As the reader should know by now, the data transfer rate is entirely different from the actual data throughput rate. That's because once a wireless link is established, the connection can be subject to interference, lost packets, and all sorts of problems, causing the "actual" transfer rate to be much lower than advertised.

"We're talking true throughput here," says Stuart Kelly, chairman of the new Task Group. "We've had proposals running at 108 Mbps and on up to 320 Mbps." Kerry also adds, "We want to harmonize European, Japanese and North American protocols right from the beginning." However, don't expect to see these newer, faster standards for a number of years.