Tuesday, February 8, 2011

802.11ac - The Upcoming WiFi Standard

Well the IEEE Task Group for 802.11ac has been making good progress, and has recently announced that they hope to have a draft completed by 2011 and products supporting the draft standard by 2012.

The new 802.11ac standard is the next upcoming WiFi protocol that will support speeds up to 1Gig speeds. From what I can decipher so far, it appears to be achieving the high throughput utilizing 256-QAM encoding, and a combination of 80Mhz[+80Mhz] and 160Mhz channels (and still supporting down to 20Mhz channels) formed out of the 5Ghz spectrum with MU-MIMO (multiple user - multiple in multiple out) stream/antenna usage.

Keep up to date on the matter via the IEEE webpage for TGac:
http://www.ieee802.org/11/Reports/tgac_update.htm

And if you really want to read up on the technical details, here is the latest TG MS Word document:
https://mentor.ieee.org/802.11/dcn/09/11-09-0992-21-00ac-proposed-specification-framework-for-tgac.doc

Saturday, February 5, 2011

Awesome CCIE Quick Review Guide

I recently stumbled across this gem while randomly perusing networking forums. This guide, created by Krzysztof Załęski at http://inetcon.org/blog/, uses a technique called 'mind mapping', and I'm a fan of it for quick technology refreshing.

Check out his blog for updates to the guide, or download the guide here:
http://inetcon.org/study/CCIE_RS_Quick_Review_Kit.pdf

Wednesday, February 2, 2011

IPv4 Address Space Exhaustion

Well as made pretty clear from the media recently, the shortage of IPv4 address space is getting close to 'no more' IPv4 address space. Within the past week, APNIC requested the last two available /8 networks to be distributed in its region. The five remaining /8's are now about to be distributed equally (per an ICANN policy) to each of the five Regional Internet Registries (RIRs), which are ARIN, RIPE NCC, APNIC, LACNIC, and AfriNIC.

Posted on the NRO website yesterday is note about a 'significant announcement' happening tomorrow (February 3, 2011) at 9:30am EST. They also mention that the event will be broadcast live over the Internet at http://www.nro.net/news/icann-nro-live-stream. It's pretty obvious that this is the event where the final 5 /8 networks are being allocated, as well as showcasing the dire need for IPv6 adoption.

Be sure to tune in to witness a pretty big piece of Internet history!