We all heard it before. 802.11ac is the next big thing in WiFi (while I disagree with that personally, believing 802.11u will bring more significant changes to the industry) bringing multi gigabit speeds to our WiFi devices.
A couple of SOHO vendors have already introduced 802.11ac products but it is well known that enterprise gear is slower at adopting new technology as it needs to mature to cope with enterprise requirements.
The industry consensus is that we will be seeing enterprise 802.11ac capable APs in second half of 2013, depending on the vendor.
A couple of months ago Cisco introduced a new, flagship 3600 series AP. It is 4x4:3 behemoth with a module slot for future expansion. Fist module introduced was the security module but more interesting is the announcement of 802.11ac module.
Cisco was a returning presenter for WFD3 having skipped the WFD2 event. In comparison to WFD1, they have been much better prepared for this one. One of the highlights was demoing a working 802.11ac module.
And it was impressive. 550 - 700 Mbps of pure WiFi bliss. Come on, look at the pretty colours. But as with any alpha release the screenshot below is not representative of what we can expect with fully matured 802.11 ac standard. Speaking of the standard, just looking at the utilisation of the spectrum, one can observe that no arbitration is performed on the 802.11ac demo. See my comments on the picture below.
Still, Cisco is the first enterprise vendor that demoed 802.11ac in any factor or form, so kudos to them.
Cheers,
Gregor
