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Amazon failed to meet the expectations of traders this week, announcing that its fourth quarter profits declined 57 per cent. While its shares dropped 8.8 per cent on the announcement, it put the numbers down to a wave of mass expansion.
The online retailer announced that its profits had slumped, making just £112.4 million in net income, but sales of its Kindle range were looking more than rosy.
Total sales from the company rose 55 per cent but when it comes to the Amazon Kindle its numbers were up 177 per cent year on year to £11 billion.
The Kindle was once again the most popular product sold through Amazon, with twice as many sold as in 2010.
When it comes to the Kindle Fire, Amazon has yet again failed to deliver any concrete numbers on the device but did go onto say that it was "very encouraged" by the tablet's figures.
It was just about digital, though, with Amazon noting that Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows Part 2 on DVD was its second most popular product sold through its website.
Looking forward, Amazon believes it will make anything between a loss of $200 million, to a profit of $100 million in the first quarter of 2012.
We're guessing the company has its fingers crossed for the latter.
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If you thought Wi-Fi couldn't get much faster than 802.11n, think again.
802.11ac, dubbed 5G Wi-Fi, promises ridiculously fast wireless connections, better range, improved reliability, improved power consumption and a free horse. (OK, we're lying about the horse.)
802.11ac is the latest evolution of Wi-Fi, and it should be particularly good for gaming and HD video streaming.
So how does it work, does it live up to the hype, and how long will you have to wait before you can get your hands on it? Let's find out.
The fastest current 802.11n Wi-Fi connections max out at around 150Mbps with one antenna, 300Mbps with two and 450Mbps with three antennas. 802.11ac connections will be roughly three times faster - so that's 450Mbps, 900Mbps and 1.3Gbps respectively. Netgear, brilliantly, illustrates this with two pictures of motorways: the first picture, showing "Today's Wi-Fi", is normal, but the one labelled "3x speed with 802.11ac" is really blurry.
As with previous Wi-Fi standards, the speeds quoted on the box and in the promotional materials are theoretical maximums, not the speeds you'll actually get: so far devices with potential top speeds of 1.3Gbps have topped out at around 800Mbps. That's still blisteringly fast, of course, but there's still a gap between advertised speeds and real world ones. 802.11ac connection speeds will be reduced by numerous factors: network overhead, which is the chatter your hardware needs to keep the connection going; interference, congestion and physical obstacles; distance; the number of simultaneous connections; and whether the router is running in compatibility mode so that older wireless kit can still connect.
Because 802.11ac has bandwidth to spare, it should be great for HD video streaming and for gaming. According to Netgear [PDF], you can say bye-bye to buffering: "802.11ac will significantly enhance the user experience by improving the playback quality to any point throughout the house. With 802.11ac, for the first time wireless will provide similar performance as wired Gigabit connections."
To improve range and reliability, 802.11ac routers can use more antennas than existing 802.11n kit: your next router may have as many as eight antennas inside it.
Wi-Fi is omnidirectional, but 802.11ac routers will be able to use directional transmission and reception technology dubbed "beamforming". The router will be able to identify the rough location of the device it's talking to and strengthen the appropriate antenna(s) accordingly. The idea is to reduce interference.
Older wireless kit uses the 2.4GHz frequency band, which is fairly crowded: your kit is potentially sharing radio frequency with next door's baby monitor, your cordless phone and even your microwave. Like high performance 802.11n kit, 802.11ac routers will use the less cluttered 5GHz band where there's considerably more room for data transmission. 802.11ac hardware will use two kinds of channels in that range: 80GHz ones and 160GHz ones.
You won't need to throw out all your old wireless-capable kit as 802.11ac routers will be backwards compatible with your existing Wi-Fi kit. For example, at this year's CES Buffalo demonstrated an 802.11ac router that operated on both the 2.4GHz and 5GHz frequency bands and that promised to play nice with 802.11a, b, g and n hardware.
As with 802.11n, hardware is coming out before the 802.11ac standard is actually finalised. That's going to happen later this year, but manufacturers are readying their products now and they'll be everywhere by the summer, with minor software updates addressing any changes that might happen to the standard before it's finalised. We'd expect 802.11ac prices to be steep initially, as they were with the first 802.11n kit, but those prices should start to fall almost immediately.
Apple's a key early adopter of wireless technology - it helped popularise Wi-Fi in the first place and was quick off the mark with 802.11n support. According to AppleInsider it's going to be quick off the mark with 802.11ac too, sticking the technology into "new AirPort base stations, Time Capsule, Apple TV, notebooks and potentially its mobile devices."
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the body in charge of the 802.11 standard, isn't skipping lots of letters: while major WiFi standards have jumped from 802.11n to 802.11ac, the IEEE didn't just skip 802.11o, p, q and so on. Successive versions of the 802.11 standard can also denote amendments to existing standards, so for example 802.11i introduced improved security and 802.11j introduced extensions for Japanese networks.
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