Digital Home Thoughts - News & Reviews for the Digital Home

"Nearly one year ago, a Sunnyvale company called Quantenna announced that it had secured approximately $25 million to begin its development of various "next-gen" wireless technologies. Today, the company is ready to break a big barrier. Quantenna's QHS 802.11n chipsets have a 4x4 MIMO antenna system with Transmit Beamforming, with the stated goal of being used in the streaming of high-definition multimedia content or in HD IPTV setups. The company says its chips use the 5 GHz and 2.4 GHz bands simultaneously, along with adaptive vector mesh routing to reduce communication latency. The three chips announced today are the QHS450 (450 Mbps max link speed, 200 Mbps max throughput), QHS600 (600 Mbps/400 Mbps), and QHS1000 (1 Gbps/600 Mbps)."

I'm all for more speed, but never at the expense of reliability - and right now I don't think 802.11n is reliable, largely because compatibility is theoretical without a finalized standard. 600 mbps sounds great - even if if means real-world speeds of half that - but until that spec is finalized, whether or not you'd actually see if working is anyone's guess.

I brought up this issue just a couple of months ago, but I feel the need to rant again: I'm incredibly dismayed at how poorly some modern networking equipment operates together. Or, rather, doesn't operate well together. I have a brand new MSI Wind netbook, and a brand new Linksys WRT310N. The screenshot above shows just how successful these two pieces of hardware work together. I've loaded the latest firmware on the Linksys router, and the latest WiFi drivers onto the MSI Wind, and it still doesn't operate correctly. Everything seemed to be working great for the first two days - I successfully used FolderShare to push more than 45 GB of data onto the MSI Wind over the weekend, and the connection never dropped. Today, I can't get it to connect at all unless I repair the connection or disable then re-enable it. I'm completely baffled. It's not like I'm trying to connect some laptop from 2000 with a PCMCIA 802.11b card - this is a brand new netbook with a 802.11b/g chip. Why don't these companies test their gear to make sure they interoperate? I'll try fiddling with it for a few more days, but I'll likely end up returning this Linksys WRT310N and going back to my trusty WRT54G router. What a disappointment!