On The State of Wireless

There's a short piece on Mindjack about the state of wireless. Actually, the piece is a minireview of a piece that Nicholas Carroll produced at Hastings Research. Yes, it's a PDF, and yes, it costs money. Having read through it, it's also totally worth it, especially if you are an organization that does basically anything with wireless.

Comments

FYI - if you're thinking wireless...

[zerocool^]

If you're thinking wireless, and you're considering college, virginia tech. We just bought 4 OC-12's, and we're putting up wireless thru the entire campus this winter, or spring, i don't know which (i suspect spring). Its already available in some parts of campus.

Re:How appropriate...

[jgaynor]

mod me down as OffTopic if you want but that is AMAZING! -

Why isnt this a frontpage article? Basically cisco is deploying an upper atmosphere wireless IP layer for planes, shuttles and research craft.

With the new version of the software, a Cisco router along with its entire network of connected IP devices can now roam seamlessly across network boundaries and connection types, the company said. For example, an airplane with a router running Cisco mobile IP can fly around the world with all passengers continuously connected to the Internet.

He said NASA will deploy Cisco's mobile networks on low-earth-orbiting research craft to allow continuous connection to the Internet.

With the economy as it is Cisco still has the capital and sway to create a wireless network that will blanket the WORLD? The potential to hack this is unbelIEVable. A strong mobile transceiver would be almost untraceable.

Beyond the sheer magnitude of this is the complexity of the technical details behind it. This network has to be completely self healing and aware of where networks will show up next, all with astoundingly fast convergence time. No current routing protocol would be able to handle this without some serious modification. Im guessing its completely proprietary.

for all you anime fans this is straight outta cowboy bebop - pictures of ed in the desert with a satellite dish come to mind.

Re:Wireless is definately the way forward.

[Phoebus0]

For corporate security, there are emerging some start-ups that I have seen that deal with restricting people's access to the wireless networks. Both of the units I have seen funtion as a firewall to the rest of the wired network. BlueSocket is one of them, and Vernier Networks are the two I've heard of. They seem resonably secure to the rest of the network, but they still don't address the issue of encryption over the air.

The author

[intuition]

Maybe you would like to see a picture of the author No? What about his wife Maxi..... or is it Lisa? If the first article wasn't deviod of any information, maybe you would like to read another penned by the same man. Of course the author has already changed his homepage to reflect the fact that his article was posted on slashdot.

As for Hastings Research : maybe you would like to see a sample of some of their other quality research. When have you ever heard a white paper draw a metaphor between market conditions and a glass being half full? But seriously they do have a six foot magnetic whiteboard to "prototype" their research. (they don't put rookies in center field either.) If you need to know they also provide a list of profitable web sites. (Look to the bottom of the page for their judicious use of "keywords" to help prop up their standing in search engine results.)

This is the worst article ever on slashdot.

Re:Have you seen Wi-Lan's latest? 192Mb/s

[A Commentor]

Notice the "per six-sector cell" in their press release: "up to 192 megabits per second per six-sector cell".

The way I read this, is that a single cell (made of 6 sectors) can support 192 Mb/s, thus each sector would only be 1/6 of that speed (32 Mb/s). In most cellular systems, a user accessing the system would be only connected to a single sector so that MAX that a user would see would be 32 Mb/s.

Not much better than 802.11b, and less than 802.11a.