WHITE PAPER

WHAT YOU NEED

TO KNOW ABOUT
802.11AC
DEMYSTIFYING THE BUSINESS AND TECHNICAL IMPLICATIONS
OF THE NEXT GENERATION OF WLAN TECHNOLOGY

JULY 2012

WHITE PAPER
WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT 802.11AC

CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION: WLANs IN TRANSITION

WHY DO WE NEED FASTER WI-FI?

802.11AC UNDER THE HOOD

HOW MANY SPATIAL STREAMS?

INTEROPERABILITY AND MIGRATION CONSIDERATIONS

CONCLUSION AND SUMMARY

802.11 TIMELINE

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WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT 802.11AC

INTRODUCTION: WLANs IN TRANSITION

The appetite for wireless bandwidth is seemingly insatiable. Fifteen years ago, the first standard wireless LANs
emerged at 1Mbps and 2Mbps to serve niche applications such as warehouse picking, inventory scanning and, in office
buildings where mobility wasnt a requirement, cordless PC connections aimed at lowering cabling costs. Fast forward
through several WLAN generations to today, and the story has completely changed.
Fifth-generation WLANs are now nearing standardization, and they are poised to run at 1Gbps speeds and beyond to
serve any number of mission-critical applications across all industries. Instead of wireless connectivity being reserved
for specialized applications or occasional connections in conference rooms, most knowledge workers today use the
WLAN as their primary access network, and mobility has become a primary requirement. Employees typically tote
a combination of smartphones, tablet computers and laptops supporting both Wi-Fi (802.11) and cellular network
connections to access many of their corporate applications.
As a result, greater wireless throughput and denser networks of wireless access points (APs) are needed to satisfy
burgeoning bandwidth demands. Todays 802.11n Wi-Fi version, offering 300Mbps to 450Mbps maximum theoretical
speeds per radio, has matured. Enterprises have been steadily installing it since 2009. But even its generous capacity
is already being tested in some organizations and soon will be in others, driving the IEEE to develop a 1Gbps WLAN
standard, called 802.11ac: Enhancements for Very High Throughput for Operation in Bands Below 6 GHz.
The 802.11ac standard now specifies WLANs running exclusively in the 5GHz band, so it will be backward-compatible
with 802.11n devices running at 5GHz. The standard is expected to be finalized next year.
.

WHY DO WE NEED FASTER WI-FI?

A number of factors are fueling industry progress with
802.11ac standards. Among them:
t
More users. Sheer traffic volume is exploding. Wi-Fi
has more or less succeeded at displacing Ethernet in
the access portion of the corporate network, so there
are simply more Wi-Fi users creating traffic. In addition,
guest traffic in certain verticals is adding to the loads.
For example, retail customers often want to use their
Wi-Fi-enabled devices in stores to comparison shop;
in turn, retailers take advantage of customers wireless
connectivity by pushing in-store advertising to them
over the airwaves.
t
More devices per user/BYOD. In addition, users now
tend to carry at least two devices; most carry a mobile
phone and a laptop, and some carry a tablet computer,
as well. This has created a dense population of devices
with varying transmit power levels, generating more
traffic and creating new Wi-Fi design considerations
for the enterprise.
t
Big apps. Users are running bandwidth-hungry
apps such as Apple iCloud and Google Drive overthe-air synchronization services, high-def video, Web
conferencing, social networking apps, Apple FaceTime
videoconferencing and Pandora radio streaming, to
name just a few. These consume far more capacity
than the low-speed data transfers of yesterday.

t
Cellular offload. A number of 3G/4G cellular carriers are

growing anxious to offload mobile WAN traffic onto
Wi-Fi wherever possible to prevent cellular traffic jams.
This works because most popular mobile devices
support both cellular and Wi-Fi connections, so cellular
subscribers can hop onto Wi-Fi when they are in range.
802.11ac will help address and facilitate all of these
situations. Final IEEE 802.11ac Working Group approval
is expected in late 2013, though, as with most WLAN
standards, the industrys Wi-Fi Alliance expects to certify
pre-standard products six to 12 months earlier than
that, most likely for the home/consumer market. 802.11ac
products earning a pre-standard Wi-Fi certification by
the alliance have been tested for interoperability by the
alliances labs with a number of other early products built to
the 802.11ac standard in its near-final state.
Note that to be considered standards-compliant,
ratification of the final standard must take place,
and products must be tested for conformity to all the
mandatory components of that standard. Standards
conformance/compliance still is not an assurance of product
interoperability, as standard features might be interpreted
and executed slightly differently. So interoperability testing
and certification remains a good idea, whether products are
pre-standard or built to the final, ratified standard.

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WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT 802.11AC

802.11AC UNDER THE HOOD

Like all flavors of 802.11 WLANs, throughput and coverage

depend on network design, environmental conditions,
vendor implementation, the size of the user population at
any given moment and other factors. However, 802.11ac
can eventually be used with up to eight antennas and
associated spatial streams (compared with a maximum of
four in 802.11n), so it is rated from 433Mbps up to nearly
7Gbps theoretical maximum speeds.

Also known as Gigabit Wi-Fi, 802.11ac represents more of an

evolutionary than revolutionary step up from 802.11n, because
the newer standard relies substantially on algorithms already
ironed out during the development of 802.11n.
Among the technologies that 802.11n and 802.11ac have in
common:

The higher end of the throughput range is targeted at

outdoor applications, where there will be less device
density compared with indoors. In addition, the eightspatial-stream support and 160MHz-wide channels are
not likely to be supported in the first group of commercially
available, pre-standard products expected late this year for
the consumer market.

t
Channel bonding for wider channels and greater

throughput
t
Multiple input, multiple output (MIMO) antenna
technology to avoid multipath interference problems and
improve data throughput
t
Beamforming, or concentrating signal strength from an
antenna toward one or more client devices

Attributes and Benefits

As with most generations of new networking technology,
getting a boost in throughput and, presumably, resulting
application performance is the main benefit expected from
802.11ac.

t
Air time fairness to prevent overall network performance

from falling back to the transmission speed of the
slowest device on the network. In other words, just as
an 802.11a client joining a 5GHz 802.11n network no longer
degrades an 802.11n clients performance in the 5GHz
band, a 5GHz-band 802.11n client is not expected to
degrade the performance of an 802.11ac client.

As noted, there is flexibility in how 802.11ac is deployed in

terms of number of antennas and spatial streams and the
width of the channels used, which all affect performance
and number of devices supported. For example, if 10 clients
today each use 30Mbps from an 802.11n AP that delivers
300Mbps throughput using three spatial streams, at least
twice as many (20 clients) could easily share an 11ac AP
that delivers 600Mbps.

802.11ac will operate in the 5GHz band, where there

are more non-overlapping channels available for design
flexibility than have been available in the 2.4GHz range
occupied by 802.11b and its successor, 802.11g. 802.11n
can run in either band. Representing a fifth-generation
of Wi-Fi (timeline, page 9), 802.11ac will make use of
80MHz- and, eventually, 160MHz-wide channels using
the channel bonding technique, which aggregates 20MHz
channels together for a larger wireless pipe within
the spectrum. Channel bonding in Wi-Fi was introduced
with 802.11n, which allowed for aggregating two 20MHz
channels for a maximum 40MHz channel width. 802.11ac
pushes the technology even farther.

This is particularly beneficial in very dense deployments, such

as universities, business offices and manufacturing floors,
where a number of devices are collocated closely together.
In addition to enabling the support of wider channels and
double the number of spatial streams than 802.11n, 802.11ac
also achieves performance improvements from enhanced
coding. Quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) jumps
from 64 QAM in 802.11n to 256 QAM in 802.11ac. The
greater the QAM number, the more bits per symbol that can
be transmitted and the faster the data rate of the wireless

Figure 1 shows the number of available non-overlapping

channels in the 5GHz band using various bonding algorithms.

Figure 1. 5GHZ NON-OVERLAPPING CHANNEL AVAILABILITY AT VARIOUS CHANNEL WIDTHS

CHANNEL
WIDTH

NO. OF CHANNELS
(U.S)

NO. OF CHANNELS
(EUROPEAN UNION)

20MHz

21

16

40MHz

80MHz

160MHz

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WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT 802.11AC

moved per megahertz of spectrum. While 802.11ns singleuser MIMO will only benefit a single device at a time,
802.11ac MU-MIMO allows multiple streams to be assigned
to different clients, increasing the total bandwidth that
can be transmitted simultaneously. In the example (see
Figure 2), an 802.11ac AP with 4 antennas could transmit a
2x2:2 stream to a 2x2:2 client, while using the other two
antennas to transmit 1x1:1 streams to 2 mobile devices
simultaneously. (see Figure 2).

link. The 802.11ac standard also specifies more aggressive

error correction codes that have fewer redundant bits and
is expected to improve rate-versus-range performance and
link reliability when operating at a distance.
New Component: Multi-User MIMO
MIMO capabilities were introduced in 802.11n. Radios
spread a users data into multiple spatial streams, and they
are transmitted through multiple antennas, propagating
over the air along different paths. When all streams reach
the client, the data are recombined.

In addition, MU-MIMO builds upon the transmit

beamforming (TxBF) option in the 802.11n standard, a
technique used to focus RF energy in a given direction to
improve signal strength and, thus, throughput of individual
client devices. This feature will be a boon to supporting
high-density networks but, again, will not likely be
supported in the very first 802.11ac products on the market.

Multi-User MIMO, or MU-MIMO, to be introduced in the

second or third wave of 802.11ac products, supercharges
the MIMO capabilities by increasing the number of bits

Figure 2. SINGLE- AND MULTI-USER MIMO OPERATIONS

Single-User MIMO (11n)

STREAM 1
STREAM 2
STREAM 3
STREAM 4

Multi-User MIMO (11ac)

1
STREAM
2
M
STREA

STREAM 3
STREAM

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WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT 802.11AC

HOW MANY SPATIAL STREAMS?

MIMO and spatial stream numbers work together to indicate
throughput potential at given ranges. Generally, the greater the
number of receive antennas, the greater the distance that a
particular data rate can be sustained. But as noted in 802.11ac
Under the Hood, page 4, the actual throughput and coverage
range users experience depends on the environment the floor
plan, building and window construction materials, configuration
of the client devices involved in the transmission, how
saturated the network is at a given time and other factors.
MIMO (and, eventually, MU-MIMO) is just one part of the
equation. It refers to the number of transmit (Tx) and receive
(Rx) antennas involved in exchanging wireless signals across
a propagation channel, which is the wireless path that signals
take through the air. 2x2 MIMO, for example, indicates two
Tx antennas and two Rx antennas. 2x3 MIMO indicates two
transmitting antennas and three receiving antennas, and so
forth. Spatial multiplexing is a mandatory component of the
802.11n and 802.11ac standards, and MIMO is required in order
for spatial multiplexing to take place. So the two work together.
As indicated, spatial multiplexing is a technique whereby
multiple antennas separately send different flows of
individually encoded signals (called spatial streams) over
the air in parallel; in essence, reusing the wireless medium
or multiplexing the signals to squeeze more data through
a given channel. At the receiving end, each antenna sees a
different mix of the signal streams. In order to decode them
accurately, the receiving device needs to separate the signals
back out, or demultiplex them (see Figure 3).

Note that the number of spatial streams that can be

multiplexed over the air is dependent on the number of
transmitting antennas. So while 2x3 MIMO has an additional
receive antenna compared to 2x2 MIMO, only two spatial
streams can be supported in both configurations. Often, to
express the number of Tx and Rx antennas as well as the
number of spatial streams supported, products are described
with the number of spatial streams following the MIMO
designation: for example, 3x3:2 indicates support for three Tx
antennas and three Rx antennas but two spatial streams, while
3x3:3 indicates three Tx antennas, three Rx antennas and three
spatial streams.
Potential Benefits of More Rx Antennas
Whether theres a benefit of having additional Rx antennas
is a matter of much debate and independent vendor
implementation and testing. The extra receive antenna might
increase the range at which a given throughput is maintained.
This factor is less likely to be relevant in high-density WLANs
in which spectrum is frequently reused with large numbers of
APs installed to create smaller cells of coverage. However,
the additional Rx antenna might also increase throughput at
a given range. When you have more receive antennas, the
system might experience something called combining gain,
in that more copies of the same transmitted signal will deliver
greater signal-to-noise ratio, which strengthens the signals and
improves throughput.
The 802.11n standard allows for up to four pairs of antennas
and four spatial streams, and the 802.11ac standard allows for
double that.

Figure 3. BASIC SPATIAL MULTIPLEXING OPERATION

Spatial
Multiplexing

Original message 1 0 1 0 1 1

1 0 1
0 1 1

Receive message

1 0 1 0 1 1

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WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT 802.11AC

Spatial Streams vs. Channel Widths

All this said, increasingly, many of the devices connecting
to Wi-Fi networks are smartphones, which typically have
supported just a single stream across a single (unbonded)
20MHz channel. So what good are more antennas, more
streams and fatter (bonded) channels?
When MU-MIMO becomes available, the antennas should be
more relevant. While a single client with one or two antennas
would not be able to fully utilize eight spatial streams offered
by an 8x8:8 11ac AP, its possible for several Wi-Fi clients to
share a larger pool of streams and antennas, so that overall
aggregate throughput improves for the client population.
Early demonstrations of a single-stream 11ac radio, mounted
in smartphone prototypes, have delivered approximately
220Mbps in a fairly challenging environment. The faster the
handset can transmit its loads, the better its battery life,
because faster devices spend less time transmitting and more
time sleeping.

INTEROPERABILITY AND
MIGRATION CONSIDERATIONS
802.11ac will be backward-compatible with 802.11n but only
with 802.11n clients operating in the matching 5GHz range.
The 2.4GHz range, which has been home to 802.11b, 802.11g,
much of 802.11n and a variety of non-Wi-Fi devices, has been
deemed impractical for enhancing WLAN throughput going
forward.
This is a potential sticking point for some of todays mobile
devices. Though a number of handsets and tablets built
specifically for enterprise applications operate in the 5GHz
band, most consumer-class handsets growing popular within
the enterprise operate in the 2.4GHz band only. As such, they
will not be compatible with 802.11ac per se. Two things will
likely happen here:
1) Many organizations will continue to support 802.11n as they
introduce 802.11ac, and the 2.4GHz radios in their 802.11n
infrastructures will continue to serve the 2.4GHz clients.

2) Newer devices will have multiple radios, including both

2.4GHz and 5GHz Wi-Fi radios. For example, the most
current version of the Apple iPhone (the iPhone 4S)
supports 2.4GHz Wi-Fi only; however, the latest version of
the Apple iPad tablet computer, the iPad 3, supports both
Wi-Fi frequencies.
While 802.11ac will not be available in many such devices for
a while, support for 5GHz suffices for backward compatibility.
And air time fairness algorithms, described earlier, will
make sure that each device transmits only for the length
of time allotted by the standard it supports so as not to
degrade performance of 802.11ac clients running on 802.11ac
backbones.
As mentioned, many of the technology concepts that were
created for and used by 802.11n were expanded upon and
applied to 802.11ac, which bodes well for interoperability
testing, as well as initial price points.
The most difficult decision in migrating, perhaps, will be in
determining channel plans that take advantage of 802.11acs
fatter channels while maintaining performance for singlestream mobile devices. Otherwise, depending what the range
and throughput requirement is for the new installation, it is
likely that an 802.11ac AP can be dropped directly into a legacy
AP location, one for one.
While 802.11n is specified to support up to four spatial
streams, most products on the market today currently support
two or three. Early 802.11ac products are likely to support just
two or three, as well. Determining whether to invest in early
802.11ac products or mature 802.11n products in the nearterm, then, is likely to depend on how product costs fall out
and each organizations philosophy over whether to continue
investments in legacy technology if it continues to do the
job needed. 802.11n was so long in coming and brought such
dramatic advances to the Wi-Fi industry, it is hard to imagine
it as a legacy technology. However, in about a two- to threeyear time frame, thats exactly what it will be.

Wi-Fi Chipset Revenue to Reach $6.1 Billion in 2015, Says NPD In-Stat, January 2012 <http://www.prweb.com/releases/In-Stat/NPDGroup/prweb9151164.htm>

11ac in Numbers
Research firm NPD In-Stat
expects the 802.11ac
standard to trigger an
explosion in Wi-Fi-enabled
cellular devices, with
shipments exceeding 650
million by 2015. In the
same year, 802.11ac is also
projected to be on one of
every four notebooks.
Use Cases for 802.11ac
The general growth in
consumption of WLAN
bandwidth is one driver
behind 802.11ac. Wi-Fi
has simply become the
default access network in
many organizations. That,
coupled with users carrying
multiple Wi-Fi-enabled
devices and carriers
wanting to offload cellular
traffic onto Wi-Fi, will soon
be pushing the limits of
802.11n. In addition, specific
applications and use cases
for Wi-Fi are adding to
the flood of Wi-Fi traffic
and requiring more dense
deployments:
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cameras
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including electronic
medical charts on
physician tablets and
real-time remote
bedside
videoconference patient
consults
t
"VUPNBUJD
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backup and
synchronization
applications
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#BDLIBVM
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aggregating traffic
from lower-speed Wi-Fi
networks

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WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT 802.11AC

CONCLUSION AND SUMMARY

802.11ac represents the fifth generation of IEEE 802.11 WLAN standards and is expected
to deliver a data rate connection of at least three times that of 802.11n. Many of the
algorithms of 802.11n are being reused, but enhanced, with 802.11ac, which should make
the technology easy to fold into existing networks.
802.11ac will be backward-compatible with 802.11n networks operating in the 5GHz range
and is expected to offer dramatic improvements in Wi-Fi reliability, throughput and range.
801.11ac is expected to be ratified by IEEE late 2013. The earliest, pre-ratified products
are expected late 2012 and will likely ship for the home/consumer market. From there,
its expected that the rollout of new IEEE 802.11ac devices will take between one and
three years. By 2015, according to experts, all new Wi-Fi products coming to market are
expected to be based on 802.11ac technology.
Enterprise-class products will ship with variations on the number of antennas, spatial
streams and channel widths, and the most important education for enterprises to seek at
this time is how wider channels, but fewer of them, will affect the organizations channel
plan. This is particularly relevant for early enterprise adopters, who will likely be supporting
large volumes of single-stream handset clients for a couple of years, as well as clients that
use the 2.4GHz band, which will be obsolete in 802.11ac. Theres a fine balance between
accommodating the high density of these devices with enough channels to avoid cochannel interference and reaping the aggregate throughput benefits of the greater channel
widths of 80MHz and, eventually, 160MHz, that have been specified by 802.11ac standards.

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WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT 802.11AC

802.11 TIMELINE
1997

1999

2003

2009

2013

FIRST GENERATION

SECOND GENERATION

THIRD GENERATION

THIRD GENERATION

FOURTH GENERATION

FIFTH GENERATION

802.11

802.11b

802.11A

802.11g

802.11n

802.11ac

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NEXT GENERATION OF CHANNEL MARKETING

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