Friday, June 29, 2012

Gigabit Wireless Router from Cisco

Today while I was browsing through the Cisco website, found out that they’ve started taking pre-orders for Gigabit Wireless router based on the 802.11ac draft spec. The model is Linksys EA6500 scheduled to release in August 2012. This means that speeds upto a Gb/s is achievable using off-the-shelf consumer routers already. They are listing “Ultimate Speeds upto 450 + 1300Mbps*”. Seriously wow!! Dual Band, so you get the 450Mbps from the n-spec and 1300Mbps from draft-ac spec.

Now, most of you would wonder why the hell do we need that much speed… I was recently trying to stream my favorite BD-Rip Avataar 3D through the XBox 360 on to my TV. But alas, I had to transcode to lower quality because my wireless-n router at 300Mbps was not good enough Sad smile. So, we definitely need this soon as more and more content is available in full HD and we want to start streaming and communicating between the different devices in our household.

Another interesting thing, is that router has built-in NFC (Near Field Communication), which can use a phone (which has NFC) for transmitting configuration. But this feature sounds like just using a technology for the heck of it. How hard is it to type a passphrase or open the router page on the browser and configure. Nevertheless, some nice technologies packed into one experimental device. And then there is also an Acer router with similar 5th gen Wifi stuff…