It's looking like 2012 might just be the year of many things. I predict it will be the year of tablets, the year of Android, the year of Windows 8, and now I'm looking forward to it being the year of speedy WiFi.
There are a few rumblings around the tech traps that devices supporting the new IEEE 802.11ac WiFi standard will start hitting the market this year.
The 802.11ac standard is WiFi on steroids. It can potentially reach data transfer speeds up to three times faster than the current king of the WiFi jungle, 802.11n. With over 1Gbps speed (compared to 802.11n's maximum 300Mbps), we are talking local area network speeds as fast as gigabit Ethernet cabled networks.
Why am I excited?
It means that clubs and studios might finally be able to ditch the spider-web of cabling for their networks.
At present, many clubs and studios are forced to use Ethernet cabling for their networked computers because current WiFi standards aren't quite up to the task of delivering the performance, range and interference protection that good old cables give you.
Clubs are often large, labyrinthine places whose floorspace is littered with objects that can act as large Faraday Cages (your gym equipment). Large distances, many metal objects, walls, multiple-floors and the sea of treadmills and stair-masters emitting electromagnetic energy all conspire together to make sure you get really poor performance out of your WiFi network. And often, this poor network performance results in poorly performing member management software, crashes, network and Internet failure and so on.
And it is for these reasons that I have always recommended clubs and studios strive to outfit their systems with Ethernet cabling as a priority, only resorting to using WiFi if their specific needs dictate as much. The problem is, if you're an existing business with existing infrastructure, shoe-horning cabling around the place can be expensive, tricky and sometimes quite ugly (you should see the mess of cables I've seen under some reception desks!).
But with 802.11ac, this might just be a thing of the past. I haven't had a chance to play with any 802.11ac devices yet, so any benefits I talk about can be considered theoretical at present, but if the scuttlebutt around the tech community is anything to go by, this new standard should be more than enough to allow me to start changing the advice I give to clubs. And we can kiss those cables good bye!
I'll write more about this technology soon. Stay tuned.
Have fun!
Mike.Ryan
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