The increasing momentum of the new 802.11ac standard was evident in the Wi-Fi-related product launches this week at CES 2014. Here’s a look at some of the new products:
–Netgear unveiled two new Wi-Fi range extenders that support a/b/g/n devices as well as the new 802.11ac standard. Both garnered CES awards for outstanding design and exceptional engineering in home networking. Netgear said that the AC750 range extender is an industry-first, providing speeds of up to 750 megabits per second for 802.11ac with a wall-plug form factor. Its AC1200 high-power extender sports even faster 802.11ac speeds of up to 1,200 Mbps with a dual-core processor. Both are designed to eliminate Wi-Fi dead zones in the home and providing lag-free gaming and video streaming.
—SMC Networks launched a new 24×8 channel data gateway capable of downstream data rates of up to 990 Mbps, the latest addition to its Veloxite family of cable modems, EMTAs and wireless gateways for cable providers to use in residential small office and SMB markets. The new Veloxite D3G2408W gateway has a wireless daughter card enabling flexible Wi-Fi configurations and supports high power dual-band, dual concurrent 3×3 Wi-Fi and 802.11ac.
SMC said that independent test house Allion Labs in Oregon achieved an actual TCP goodput rate of 755 Mbps with the gateway and that figure when combined with 235 Mbps in the 2.4 GHz band means that the gateway can drive a concurrent maximum TCP throughput of almost 1 gigabit per second of Wi-Fi traffic. The device is among eight Veloxite products that have received or are in the process of receiving CableLabs certification.
—Buffalo Americas introduced three new high-performance wireless routers that support 802.11ac, including the AirStation AC433 wireless travel router WMR-433, which the company said will be available in the second quarter for about $60.
–Networking product company TP-Link had its first enterprise dual-band Wi-Fi access point with power over Ethernet (PoE), which supports 802.11ac and provides up to 1,750 Mbps of available bandwidth with simultaneous 2.4 GHz 450 Mbps and 5 GHz 1,300 Mbps. The EAP320 will be available in the third quarter of this year. .
