80211ac

Just when you thought you had began to understand Wi Fi and even appointed yourself with an 80211n router at home, along comes the IEEE with 80211ac and Gigabyte connectivity. Don't despair, however. Apple has yet to include the new standard in its iPad and iPhone preferring to wait until implementation of the full standard and for the technology to mature. Apple does have an 80211ac router and reception for the Mac. According to some, the full standard will not be finalized until some time in 2014. Give yourself a little time and then upgrade to the gigabyte club. The phone company and channel TV becomes more and more irrelevant.

Recalling the story behind 80211 and Heady Lamar's incredible, though not implemented, contribution of the concept of spread spectrum to the US Navy during WWII -- the 80211 WI FI standard utilizes that same spread spectrum concept. Think of it as grains of digital sand (groups of photons) spread randomly but coded rather than radio waves. The N standard improved on the speed of spread spectrum by utilizing channels. The AC standard gooses it up even further by (1) wider band width, 160 MHz, (2) MIMO a strategy of using multiple antennas - up to 8, (3) multi user MIMOs and (4) High density modulation, 256 QAM, quadrature amplitude modulation. This further development brings us up to 1 Gig; it furthermore increases the range and capacity and is backward compatible.

AC will surely not be the end of our access revolution. Expect quantum communication in our  lifetime furthering the evolution of free information at will in our pocket.