Buffalo details 802.11ac 1.75Gb/s wireless router
Buffalo's latest WZR-1750H Wi-Fi router promises overall wireless bandwidth of 1.75Gb/s.
Based around the less-congested 5GHz part of the spectrum, rather than the more commonly used 2.4GHz band, 802.11ac boasts an overall throughput of up to 1.3Gb/s, around three times faster than the current 802.11n Wi-Fi standard.
Although it'll be a while before UK broadband hits the point where 802.11n is saturated, there is growing interest in high-speed wireless technologies thanks to the increased prevalence of high-definition streaming media systems in the home. With two of the three consoles making up this current generation boasting support for streaming video - either through Windows Media Center for the Xbox 360 or via DLNA for the PlayStation 3 - it's not uncommon for homes to have a lot of data whizzing back and forth on the LAN side of the router.
'Buffalo has always been at the forefront of wireless technology, proven by the delivery of the first Draft G and Draft N wireless products to the market,' crowed Buffalo's Paul Hudson at the announcement. 'Delivering a cost-effective, high performance Wi-Fi solution that leverages the next generation 802.11ac technology is just part of Buffalo’s ongoing commitment to innovation, engineering excellence and enabling consumers to use current and future technology in the home and in the cloud.'
The company's first 802.11ac product has been confirmed as the Buffalo AirStation WZR-1750H, a router which offers five gigabit Ethernet ports alongside Wi-Fi connectivity covering 802.11a/b/g/n and 802.11ac standards with a total aggregate throughput of 1.75Gb/s. In addition, the company has confirmed plans to launch the WLI-TX4-1300H, an 802.11ac-compatible wired-to-wireless bridge with four gigabit ports.
Full pricing and availability have yet, sadly, to be confirmed by the company.
Is Buffalo's announcement to be welcomed, or will it take real-world performance tests before you think about replacing your existing networking gear? Share your thoughts over in the forums.
Previous Article
22 Comments
Discuss in the forums Replyit's no use having super fast connection when you have to bridge it across your house. the resulting speed after bridging will be no better than single large coverage N router.
If it is anything like 802.11n 2.4/5ghz though, I'd imagine that that 1.3Gbps is going to translate in to more like 200-300Mbps of real world speed in ideal scenarios, which is still a pretty good improvement on 802.11n.
However, my wired 1Gbps ethernet is probably still going to blow it out of the water in all real world scenarios. Of course down the road when things like tabs and laptops incorporate 802.11ac I'll certainly get a router that will. For now though, 802.11n 150Mbps is all I need, because I don't have a wireless device that can handle more than that.
What I am looking forward to more than this is low power and inexpensive 10GBE. I did just wire my house last year for 1GBE with Cat 5e, but it wouldn't take too much to rewire it with some Cat 6A for 10GBE if the switches could come down under $150 and the NICs would drop under $100 each (and use less than 8w/3w respectively). Probably just a matter of another 2-3 years before we see that, but I anxiously await that day when I need RAID setups to saturate my 10GBE network (and maybe need an upgraded file server to also handle pushing/pulling that much data to disks). 110MB/sec just seems so sedate in comparison to 1000MB/sec+ capable links (even if none of my disks, even SSDs can handle that, I'd still love to be able to push 200-300MB/sec to/from a 3 disk RAID5 array and heck there are plenty of single disk 7200rpm 3.5 inch drives that can handle over 130MB/sec average speeds these days, let alone the 110MB/sec limit of GBE).
Also, it won't run much faster (if at all) than Gigabit ethernet, so if you have this wired, there is little reason to dump it (it's cheaper and more reliable). Not many systems can push that much data over ethernet and then you have the wireless overhead and connection quality.
Still, it's a BIG jump for wireless. I want it!
Not 1000MB/s, but having more than 110MB/s would be nice. If I'm pulling from SSD to SSD over a network having 300-400MB/s cuts transfer times notably. We've had GigE for 10 years now, it's time for an upgrade!
Totally agreed.
Gigabit E is enough to use it as a slow internal drive, but a bit more would be nice at times.
There was rumors that 10Gbe was due start of this year, I wonder what happened.
In a corporate environment, 10GbE can be invaluable, at least in the server room - a heavily used corporate network with many clients and some high power servers may be hammering server resources hard enough to generate multiple Gb/s of traffic, such that 1GbE would be a real bottleneck.
But for home use, unless you have some kind of monster power user requirements (like editing uncompressed HD video stored on a FAST file server, which is hardly a standard usage case in the home) 1GbE is more than fast enough. This means IMHO 10GbE is unlikely to reach mass market adoption in the near term, and prices will stay high.
Until I get the walls re-done in my house (5+ years) I don't really want to go down the wired LAN route (done properly with channels and LAN ports - like the electrics), therefore fast reliable wireless is preffered option to trailing cables or home plugs.
Those are fiber optic, and don't exactly work with a common home router.
theoretical(spec) value =?
practical value=?
Yep, Wireless N only gives me half the speed and less range compared to Wireless G.
No. Wider channel = more bandwidth. 802.11ac is faster because it uses 80MHz or 160MHz channels rather than the 20MHz/40MHz channels that n uses. You could transpose n to 5GHz or ac to 2.4GHz and it wouldn't make them any faster/slower.