According to industry innovator Airgo Networks, Inc., they have announced that NETGEAR, Inc. will ship the world’s fastest consumer wireless networking solution, based on Airgo’s third generation True MIMO chipset technology, a move to meet the needs of hi-speed, long range, wireless networking, to support new multimedia applications, requiring huge bandwidth demand. The NETGEAR wireless product line, named RangeMax 240, consists of router products, USB products for desk top and work station PCs, and small adapter cards for laptops. All these products support True MIMO Gen3 with data rates up to 240Mbps, providing consumers with faster-than-wired speeds over a wireless network; almost five times the speed of some conventional wireless networking technologies on the market today.
As most wireless users may be concerned with frequency licensing, they will be assured that products featuring Airgo True MIMO Gen3 are fully compatible with 802.11a/b/g protocol, thus operating at license-free 2.4GHz (for most countries) frequency. Henceforth, it can be used with any other 802.11 device on a network.
Theoretical analysis shown that RangeMax could operate with data rates up to 240Mbps, but Real-world tests have shown that Airgo’s third generation True MIMO actually provides an actual throughput of at least 120Mbps, with uncompressed traffic. Nonetheless, it has impressively surpassed the performance of a wired 100BaseT Ethernet network. Airgo’s True MIMO Gen3 chipset actually features a single chip fully integrated with two complete radios, to achieve further aggressive board-level integration, which has resulted in a 15% reduction in the overall Bill of Material (BOM) cost and a 20% reduction in power consumption. NETGEAR’s RangMax technology also has a unique capability to adapt to changing wireless condition, with RangeMax 240 dynamically changing its channel to avoid interference from neighbouring wireless networks, hence maintaining reliable, high-performance, long range connections to clients.
The new advanced True MIMO™ Gen 3 technology from Airgo Networks uses spatial multiplexing to stream multiple data streams over a single channel, new Adaptive Channel Expansion™ (ACE™) technology for dynamically increasing performance to support bandwidth-intensive applications in a Wi-Fi friendly way, and automatic channel selection to provide the clearest and most available channel connections. Furthermore, it also offers full speed hardware accelerated encryption for the 128 bit AES, TKIP and WEP standards as well as the latest quality of service (QoS) mechanisms for video, voice and audio.
Secure and easy-to-use, RangeMax 240 incorporates NETGEAR’s popular SmartWizard™ Installation Assistant and Assisted Firmware Update to ensure ease-of-installation and management, and enable automated retrieval and installation of firmware upgrades. NETGEAR’s “Touchless” Wi-Fi Security provides a simple interface enabling users to easily set up and connect to a secure network using standards-based Wi-Fi network security including Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) and Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA-PSK and WPA2-PSK).
With increasing home and office wireless networking users, NETGEAR RangeMax 240 does provide the next generation of wireless devices, promoting long-range, dynamical self-optimisation, hi-speed wireless networking. This product line is likely to be introduced to the market in early 2006. Keep a lookout on these cool products, if you like hi-speed Wi-Fi networking at home.
# Figure illustrating strength of link rate (Mbps) with increasing distance, and comparing with standard 802.11g (54Mbps) protocol.
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