We’ve been stuck at the 802.11n wireless standard for quite some time. It got all the way up to 600Mbps with multiple antennas and multiple simultaneous connections, but getting even 300 Mbps from a high end 802.11n router is as realistic as landing on Mars next year.

It was time to come out with new standard and 802.11ac seems to be getting in shape this year. It offers speeds from 900Mbps to 1750Mbps. The first routers are getting out to market as we speak and Asus G75VW might be the first notebook featuring one of these new WLAN cards.

Asus has even demonstrated this notebook with speeds close to 400Mbps out of Broadcom 900Mbps built in WLAN card and Asus RT AC66U just announced 802.11ac was at the another end of the wireless wire.

The demo, made by an anonymous Taiwanese marketing guru was a router placed a couple of centimeters, an about an inch away from a notebook, but to cut them some slack, this was probably necessary as Computex tradeshow flow that was flooded by hundreds of different wireless devices and networks.

More devices will come this year, and 802.11ac is here to stay for a few more years. You mobile phone, a central device that never leaves your sight still doesn’t support USB 3.0 or 802.11ac, but some other devices might. Phones probably won’t get to 802.11ac before 2013.
With an 8-antenna access point and two-antenna devices at 160MHz under multi-user-multiple-input-multiple-output at 160MHz per channel you can get all the way to 6.93Gbits per second but this is something to expect in the very distant future.

You can see the first notebook in action here.