What will be the channel names when 11ac comes out?
Last Post: April 4, 2013:
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I was just wondering what will the vendors choose to name the 802.11ac channels. For 11n, 40Mhz channels had a suffix + or - and its was easy to understand that channel 36 is used for 20Mhz and +/- for 40Mhz. How are they going to identify 80 and 160Mhz width channel?
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Interesting question. I hope the solution is unambiguous.
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It will be interesting to see exactly how they reference them. Technically, an 80 MHz channel will be two adjacent, non-overlapping 40 MHz channels. In fact, the standard seems to know only of 80 MHz channels that are created through the use of four 20 MHz adjacent non-overlapping channels. Indeed an 80+80 operation is supported, which does not require adjacency, but all single 80 MHz channels are comprised of two adjacent 40s or four adjacent 20s.
Therefore, we are likely to see specs like 36+3 (to reference channel 36, plus the next three) and 52+3 and so on, but only time will tell. Of course, the current pool of consumer-grade products simply don't reveal much in the way of configuration there :-)Alternatively, we may see channel assignments simply based on the description of 80-5210 or something like this, which indicates an 80 MHz channel with a center frequency of 5210. There will still be a primary 20 MHz channel for backward compatibility.
Frames Are Food,Tom
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