Berlin: Just as the ac WLAN wireless standard is beginning to gain a foothold, the first few manufacturers have already announced devices featuring the next-generation standard called ad WLAN, or IEEE 802.11ad.
In theory, the latter is capable of transmitting data five times faster than the ac standard which is also known as IEEE 802.11ac. The new technology is mainly suited to beaming movies from your laptop to a nearby television set.
One of the first ad routers about to hit the market is the Talon AD7200 by TP Link that is to include two USB 3.0 ports, which can be used to connect hard drives. However, TP-Link has yet to provide information on the pricing and release date of its Talon router.
As for consumer-grade devices, Taiwanese computer manufacturer Acer recently unveiled the ad-WLAN-ready Travelmate P648. The 14-inch business laptop will reportedly sport a magnesium-aluminium alloy casing and sell at 1,130 euros in Europe when it is released in April.
While ac WLAN transmits data at a speed of 1.3 gigabits per second (Gbit/s) in the 5-gigahertz (GHz) band, its ad equivalent is theoretically capable of up to 7 Gbit/s in the 60-GHz band.
It uses broadband point-to-point connections that are fine over shorter distances. Streaming high-resolution movies from the couch to the TV set this way should work. But don't expect the whole house to get the signal.
In real life, router manufacturers tend to blend available WLAN frequency bands, which also includes the 2.4-GHz band, to achieve stable and rapid data transfers in most situations.
The WLAN chipsets of such devices are usually also backward compatible with older standards.?
dpa
