Frequently Asked Questions of WAC730

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ProSAFE

WAC720 and WAC730

and everything 802.11ac

Frequently Asked Questions

1. What is 802.11ac?

802.11ac is the newest generation of the WiFi standard. Sometimes

referred to as the 5th generation (aer 802.11b, 802.11a, 802.11g,

and 802.11n). Within the 802.11ac standard, there are 2 waves (or

stages) of implementation. Wave 1 is generally available today, and

Wave 2 products are slowly coming to the market. Wave 2 builds

on wave 1 and includes MU-MIMO and support for 4 streams (over

3 in wave 1) as well as higher throughput. NETGEAR WAC720 and

WAC730 products are Wave 1 products. WAC740 (planned to launch

by Q2 2016) is a Wave 2 product.

2. What trends are driving adoption of 802.11ac?

Proliferation of video, increases in the number of WiFi devices, and

cloud enabled applications are three key factors in driving the adoption

of the 802.11ac.

More than 50% of Internet trac in 2016 will be video, and that

will increase to more than 80% by 2019. Video demands higher

throughput and 802.11ac delivers the transmission pipeline to

support higher service expectations.

Adoption of BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) across enterprise and

now extending to K-12 education, along with the proliferation of WiFi

enabled smartphones and tablets demands a solution that requires

support of higher client capacity per radio at the speciﬁc rate.

802.11ac can support higher density of clients at a given rate.

With cloud hosted applications, the trac proﬁle of clients have

changed. More applications are now hosted on the cloud, resulting an

increase of trac over the network (and wireless access) as compared

to the traditional model, where the applications are hosted directly on

the client device. This increase of trac over the network mandates an

increasing size of pipe (wired and wireless) for network connectivity.

3. What is the frequency that 802.11ac operates?

802.11ac operates on the 5 GHz frequency band. Most of the

802.11ac Access Points are dual band with concurrent operation at

2.4 and 5 GHz. Wireless-ac devices use 802.11n standards on the

2.4 GHz band (and therefore, generally at lower throughput, around

300 Mbps to 450 Mbps of theoretical PHY rate). Furthermore, the

5 GHz frequency band is a much quieter, less noisy environment,

and therefore, client devices that operate at 5 GHz using 802.11ac

are expected to have both higher throughput and a better user

experience. WAC720 and WAC730 are both dual band concurrent

access points.

4. Is 802.11ac backward compatible with 802.11n/a?

Yes, 802.11ac standard is backward compatible with 802.11n and

802.11a operating at 5 GHz. The legacy user experience will be

transparent when the infrastructure is migrated from 802.11n/a

to 802.11ac .

5. What are the key dierences between 802.11ac

Wave 1 and 802.11n?

There are 4 key technical advancements that are achieved by

802.11ac that enables higher throughput and better user experience:

• Stronger encoding with 256 QAM to enable more robust

transmission of data

• Wider channel bandwidth (up to 80 MHz for enterprise use) to

enable higher throughput

• More spatial streams (up to 4) to maximize throughput and

probability of successful delivery

• Operates on less crowded, less noisy 5 GHz frequency band

Summary of content (3 pages)

PAGE 1
ProSAFE® WAC720 and WAC730 and everything 802.11ac Frequently Asked Questions 1. What is 802.11ac? 3. What is the frequency that 802.11ac operates? 802.11ac is the newest generation of the WiFi standard. Sometimes referred to as the 5th generation (after 802.11b, 802.11a, 802.11g, and 802.11n). Within the 802.11ac standard, there are 2 waves (or stages) of implementation. Wave 1 is generally available today, and Wave 2 products are slowly coming to the market.
PAGE 2
ProSAFE WAC720 and WAC730 and everything 802.11ac Frequently Asked Questions 6. What is the benefit of stronger encoding with 256 QAM? Stronger encoding gives each transmitted bit of data more granular specification or representation, such that if one bit of data is corrupted, it is easier to correct the data without retransmission.
PAGE 3
ProSAFE WAC720 and WAC730 and everything 802.11ac Frequently Asked Questions 13. Is 802.11ac going to deliver significant larger area coverage than 802.11n? Not necessarily. The advent of 802.11ac with the many technical advances as described above, are mainly intended to deliver higher throughput and more reliability. Users may see better throughput at the edge of coverage, but the 802.11ac standard was not defined to specifically improve the coverage area of Access Points. 802.