FCC plans to free up spectrum, boost Wi-Fi speeds

Hi there
I thought most countries were ALREADY using 5 GHZ Band -- we certainly have it and AFAIK it's fairly common place within the EU area as well.

Most of the 2.2 - 2.4 Ghz band gets fairly congested in big cities like London, Paris, Brussels etc. so using 5 GHZ wi-fi on your router works just fine -- although if you live in buildings with a load of concrete you might need a repeater to get a decent signal.

Nearly all routers I see on sale now are Dual 2.4 - 5 GHZ band routers -- at set up time you can choose which protocol and which band to use.

With a decent connection and a good USB receiver you should be able to get decent download speeds of around 5 - 8 MB / Sec (still slower by far than using a LAN. I think with a 2.4 Ghz Wi-Fi you are probably lucky to get more than 2 MB/Sec download sped whatever the speed supplied to your router -- even the High speed Fibre Optic stuff -- it's the Wi-Fi technology that slows you down.

High quality Wi-Fi receivers currently cost the earth -- if you need faster than 5 Mb/s for your downloads then I suggest you stick with a LAN (1 GB sec theoretically possible if your ISP can give you that much bandwidth). Even 2 Mb/sec is perfectly OK for streaming HD TV movies to your device by VOD services.

The 4G spectrum (Phones etc) will be using most of the old 800 MHZ band formerly occupied by the analog UHF Ch 21-63 TV which ceased broadcasting in these frequencies at least a year or two ago when replaced by Digital Terrestial TV.

Cheers
jimbo

I've just stuck with 802.11g in my house (still got an ancient Linksys WRT54G, thats stable as can be). It's fast enough to outperform my ISP bandwidth. And when I need to transfer large files through my home network, I plug in the gigabit network cable and transfer at approx 85MB/sec.

jimbo45 said:

Hi there
I thought most countries were ALREADY using 5 GHZ Band -- we certainly have it and AFAIK it's fairly common place within the EU area as well.

Click to expand...

The U.S. government is using that band already. See, they can do whatever they want. We peons get the table scraps when they feel like it.

Hi there
I'm already using 802-11n on 5 GHZ -- Wi-Fi -- works fine.

-----------------(from 802-11n Wi Fi description) ----------
Channels operating with a width of 40 MHz are another feature incorporated into 802.11n; this doubles the channel width from 20 MHz in previous 802.11 PHYs to transmit data, and provides twice the PHY data rate available over a single 20 MHz channel. It can be enabled in the 5 GHz mode, or within the 2.4 GHz if there is knowledge that it will not interfere with any other 802.11 or non-802.11 (such as Bluetooth) system using the same frequencies.[SUP][3][/SUP]
MIMO architecture, together with wider-bandwidth channels, offers increased physical transfer rate over 802.11a (5 GHz) and 802.11g (2.4 GHz).[SUP][4][/SUP][SUP] ....[/SUP]

What's good about the 5GHZ band is that it doesn't cause interference when I'm using my Video transmitter to transmit signals from my Satellite receiver to a 2nd / 3rd TV or get interfered with when micro wave ovens are being used either.

Screenshot enc

Cheers
jimbo

I have 5ghz support on my router, but NONE of my devices support it, even a 2011 laptop. I guess here in the USA devices don't come with 5ghz support very much yet. So I have a 5ghz access point with nothing to connect to it. Everything, even N devices, must still connect to the 2.4ghz one.

I bought a new router recently, which comes with 5 GHz. At first I didn't what to think of it. I did a Google search and found that 5 GHz has less range but faster speeds. I happen to have two devices w/ 5 GHz, a Sony Ultrabook tablet and a 3rd generation iPad. My iPhone 4S does NOT have it. I started using the iPad on 5 GHz because router is nearby and the speed can't hurt. A free WiFi utility shows I am the only one in the neighbor w/ 5 GHz...