Networking
An Inconvenient Truth: Draft 11n ≠ 100 Mbps Ethernet
Wired Ethernet is not going to be replaced by 802.11n or any other wireless technology on the horizon anytime soon, if ever.
How do I make such a bold statement? Well, the facts really speak for themselves. The figure below is taken from the Wireless Performance Charts and show downlink throughput vs. path loss curves for three draft 11n products, representing the three major draft 11n chipsets.
Figure 1: Downlink Throughput - 20 MHz bandwidth mode
And in case of encryption, 28 to 75% reduction when WEP is enabled, 35 to 77% for WPA/TKIP and 11 to 35% with WPA2/AES.
So it would seem that WPA2/AES is the only way to go for draft 11n wireless security. But, even then, you’ll still pay to play. WPA2/AES also throws in an additional curve with significantly different performance for down and uplink for two of the three chipsets.
