802.11n Challenge

The official IEEE 802.11n standard was ratified in September 2009, several months after the authors published their last wireless industry challenge. Since then, enterprise investments in older 802.11a/b/g technologies have quickly dropped off. The competitive ground is currently all about 802.11n, which increases Wi-Fi connect rates by nearly 6 times and actual throughput by nearly 8 times per radio, depending on infrastructure implementation and the client devices in use. Fortunately, 802.11n systems remain backward compatible with legacy 802.11a/b/g client devices.