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World's first 802.11ac wireless demo is wired

World's first 802.11ac wireless demo is wired

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The world's first 802.11ac wireless demo from Buffalo

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Buffalo 802.11ac demo
Buffalo 802.11ac demo

We just checked out Buffalo's booth, the only company that has a working demo of the next generation 802.11ac Wi-Fi here at CES, and they have a pretty crazy-looking setup running at about 800Mbps. The only catch is ...it's wired. Data is still running over RF, but the signal is just never transferred over the air because the interference is too high. The show floor is so noisy with 2.4GHz and 5GHz networks, even release hardware — which this isn't — would have a hard time getting decent transfer rates. Buffalo's representatives told us that once final hardware based on 802.11ac draft 2.0 is available at the end of this year (hopefully), it should run at about 600Mbps in real world conditions. That's a significant speed boost over the current 802.11n, which maxes out around 200Mbps on the latest routers. Once wireless ac gets more refined, it should push well beyond that.