Intel's 802.11A Wireless: 5x Faster

Jaben writes: "Intel today released the first 802.11A wireless LAN devices which offer more than a fivefold increase in speed over the current 802.11B. as soon as more devices get onto the market this new technology will really make wireless a possible alternative instead of a neat item to play with."

Comments

Intel is not the *first*

[supz]

I was looking around SMC's site a few weeks ago and they had already released an 802.11a wireless access point.

Re:Intel is not the *first*

[Paul9196]

Didn't /. post another article on proxim releasing the first of the 802.11a products like a month ago? I remember reading it here, because I called their company and got a kit from them to try out at work. I think it was about ~$450 for two cards and ~$860 for the AP. They said the AP won't ship till the end of this month though. I received the cards today and gave it a test try. I transfered a ~730Mb divx movie from laptop to laptop through sftp connection between them in adhoc mode. I think it topped out at about ~800Kbps transfer rate and the laptops were about 3 feet from each other. I had the 2x software compression technology on as well to try and boost the speed, but considering it was a) a compressed movie b) ssh compression and c) using 2x compression from proxim, it's hard to tell how much it would help. They claim they can get 108Mbps with optimal compression on files sent. If anyone wants to learn more about how proxim's stack up, let me know and I'll let you know how well it works through their APs when they arrive.

not actually first??

[sr105]

Wasn't there an article on here a while back about another company that was delivering 802.11a "first"?

802.11b isn't a toy

[tonyc.com]

"[T]his new technology will really make wireless a possible alternative instead of a neat item to play with."

Excuse me, but an 11 megabit wireless connection isn't quite worthless just yet. How many home users, even with DSL or cable modems, are pushing this limit? And how many offices are still using 10baseT LANs, or 10baseT hubs on even faster LANs? To all these users, 802.11b is still 10% overkill. Will 400% overkill make us any happier or more productive?

Plus, 802.11a is much more power-hungry, making it a decidedly unattractive choice for wireless PDAs. What say ye?

Not the first

[mosch]

Despite what this article says, Intel is not the first company to release 802.11a devices. Proxim has the Harmony line of 802.11a devices, and has for some time.

Slashdot needs a fact checker.

Re:Not the first

[CaseyHaxor]

For those of you interested, I wrote a review a while back on Proxim's 802.11a / 2X cards. These are the radios that are 802.11a compatible and also claim a blazing 108mbps bitrate.

http://www.seattlewireless.net/index.cgi/ProximR ev iew

Proxima also has an 802.11a product

[hackman]

Proxim also has a line of 802.11a stuff, possibly a little further along. They have an Access Point that should be available at the end of November roughly, but the cards are available now supposedly. There is a company called Luna Communications handling the early release stuff.. Lunacom.com

Here's the link to Proxim

We're planning on getting a setup soon, the claim of 54Mbit/s from the x2 technology sounds way too good to be true! Anyone have experience on actual speeds that they get? I've never even gotten close to 1/2 of the 802.11b bandwitdh maximum (11Mbit/s).

Brett

Intel Not 1st to Market with 802.11a

[PhotonSphere]

Proxim has had 802.11a wireless gear out for a little while now. Their Harmony 802.11a FastWireless Kit is a prime example. In fact, we have an 802.11a wireless node up in our community wireless freenet.

While the improvement in throughput is excellent, it comes at a cost of range. The 5.4GHz spectrum does not carry as far as the 2.4GHz band, used in 802.11b. This difference will be felt the most in long-range applications, whether it be a directional long-shot or the more omni-directional community wireless networks such as BAWUG or Houston-Wireless.

--
The Sphere Guerilla Net
Space City, TX

Re:COST!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Cost is NOT the main problem with wireless, esp. wireless networking. A $200 one time cost for the access point with $100 NICs is nothing for a lot of networks.

Don't talk about Joe Public--he don't care about no stinkin wireless even if it was cheap. It's the folks that want to play with the stuff that are all excited by it.

The main problem? It's the line of sight requirement, or, to put it another way, the limited area of coverage.

I'd love to set up cells of networks with friends in the neighborhood, but the few hundred feet limitation sucks. And if I want to direct it to a friend's tower or another location, I need line of site, which is not common in surburbia or even many rural locations between two networks who want to hook up.

Solve those issues, and I would have been an adopter. My neighborhood is entirely DLC'd. No DSL. No cable modem. Satellite--well, bleh. Meanwhile, I have 2 T1 equivalent connections 1.5 miles away. Hell, they're even on a hill. But it's on the crest on the wrong side to where they need to go. Zoning laws prevent towers of the height necessary (and it be damn ugly if it was allowed.)

I would have been a long-time adopter of wireless products. Everyone in my neighborhood would be as well. I could set up VPNs with adjacent neighborhoods. Use cell technology to bypass providers. But the thing is, the range is fine if you focus and direct the antennae, but with too many common interruptions, like trees, roads, hills, squirrels, you get big problems.

I'm still waiting on Cisco's VOFDM or whatever that was on /. a while back that did not require line of site. Unfortunately, when I read the info that was available back then, it sounded like it was targetted at ISPs and businesses, not the home market.

Solve the line of site issue and you'd get big adoption, since you can then bypass providers almost regardless of the characteristics of the land that you live on (well, unless you live on the side of a mountain).

Re:5x more secure?

[cymen]

IPSec. Why waste your time with anything else? I really want a guide for getting Linux with FreeSwan to talk to FreeBSDs IPSec (using racoon?). There are a number of guides to getting IPSec working on Windows 2000, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, etc... Here are a few links:


How to setup IPsec interoperable for Linux, OpenBSD and PGPNet
Replacing WEP With IPsec

Why does IPSec with Linux seem like such a hack? FreeSwan is pretty annoying - why don't they just get IPSec into the kernel and go from there? Instead there appears to be a megapatch. It just makes me nervous. It's probably ok but man... Also, while I'm bitching, IPSec is a bit of a pain - or at least the implementations are. It doesn't need to be this complicated.

Re:better solution: same hardware

[Anonymous Coward]

The article said that the 802.11a access point is compatible with 802.11b adapters, easing the upgrade path a little.

Re:Up and downwars compatibility?

[emeb2]

802.11a uses OFDM whereas 802.11b uses DSSS, and they're in completely different frequency bands. Consequently, dual-protocol devices can't share much of their hardware between the two standards. Right now, there aren't any chipsets that support both, although there are some in the works - the major hardware vendors are keenly aware of the need for this.

Re:5x more secure?

[cduffy]

It doesn't have to be secure (think IPsec), but I'm sure that everyone can see major benfits of making a technology that openly broadcasts data more secure.

I don't.

Picture this:

I have an incoming connection, a router, and a wireless network. I have several hosts on the wireless network. The router uses IPsec to communicate with the internal hosts, accepts only hosts with known keys, and ignores all other connections.

What is the advantage of having the wireless protocol itself have the overhead of a separate, redundant security layer? Why would you want the separate software complexity of configuring and tracking allowed-host lists for two protocol layers instead of one?

Down that path lies having every last protocol layer being complicated by trying to do a job which is handled satisfactorily by every other one. Far better to have a single layer which does security and Does It Right than to complicate 802.11 (or any other low-level protocol) by adding complex functionality which can be handled somewhere else.

Further, consider: If 802.11 has security built into it, then whenever that security is broken, 802.11 (and the hardware that uses it) needs to be changed; same for every other low-level layer. Much better to have only one higher-level layer to keep current/secure (and have to swap out the router and install new endpoint drivers in my theoretical example, but not have to replace the wireless hardware).

This is news?

[Luminous Coward]

Nevermind I've had several legitimate wireless submissions rejected. How is an Intel press release news? (I am now a sour geek).

If you dig PR, then head to 802.11 Planet. You'll get all the corporate lubing you could ever hope for.

802.11a is not new, it's been around since 1999. Check the IEEE website. They have the document available for free download.

It's fast but look at the range

[ibex42]

802.11a is not as great as it seems. The range at which you can get 54Mpbs is only 10-15 meters. It's only great if you use it within those distances. 802.11a only offers 11Mbps in the 30-40m range which is half the range of 802.11b @ 11Mbps.

Many people will want to stick with 802.11b because it will still cost less even if the 802.11a nics are no more expensive. 802.11a means many more access points for the same amount of coverage as a 802.11b network.

Beware the marketing hype!

Why products are insecure

[billstewart]

Cell phones, cordless phones, wireless networking, etc. should all use strong encryption, yet none of them do?

Sometimes you have to attribute it to malice, sometimes to stupidity, sometimes to changes in technology.

• Analog cellphones were too early, and you need to digitize data to do effective encryption. Analog cordless phones have the same problem, plus they're trying to be cheap.
• Digital cellphones are primarily weak because of malice - the US government armtwisted the US TDMA and CDMA standards committees into using obnoxiously weak encryption, with the leverage that crypto export laws could be used to prevent them from selling profit-making cell site equipment internationally and getting cheap handsets made internationally.
  
• The European GSM primary encryption algorithm A5/1 is technically incompetent, and doesn't have enough bits in the encryption keys, but as Goldberg et al. discovered, it's further weakened by setting 10 of its bits to all-zeros. And the alternate encryption algorithms designed for non-politically-connected countries are even weaker. The algorithm incompetence could have been prevented by developing it in public, with some competent peer review, but the demands for secrecy blocked it - as anybody in the crypto business knows, that's a big lose.
  
• Anything using 40 or 64 bit crypto is limited by US export laws (either current at the time the stuff was designed, or obsolete but old habit.)
  
• 56-bit DES encryption used to be adequate technology, but reality caught up with them. Unfortunately, it does enough slow bit-twiddling that the triple-DES variation, which is strong enough for anything, is too slow for many high-speed applications unless you add appropriate hardware implementations or a fast CPU. Also, there are applications that only use 56-bit single-DES for US export law reasons (again, generally no longer applicable, but some countries also restrict imports.)
  
• Any current 128-bit symmetric algorithm is strong enough (though some of them use MD5 hashes to generate keys, and those are looking technically shaky - but you can avoid that.) IDEA had minor patent problems (but Ascom-tech was friendly about free licenses for non-commercial use, and reasonably priced for commercial use.)
  
• RC4 encryption has a few simple rules about using it safely, like "never use the same key twice" and "if you're using it to XOR with your plaintext, make sure to design your application so it doesn't give away information." That's what killed Microsoft PPTP, and it's one of the problems with WEP. No malice, just incompetence.
  
• Authentication is hard. Sure, the RSA algorithm provides some of the fundamental tools, and now that the patent's expired it's easier to use them, but if you want to limit access to authenticated authorized users, you have to solve the problem of deciding who's authorized to do what, how to authenticate that they are, and how to distribute the data to enforce it. This is where many systems choke. Do you need PKIs? Do you want to distribute shared secrets? Do you want to allow promiscuous connections from anybody driving by with am 802.11b in their laptop and still have something you call security?
  
• The market is usually more concerned about authentication than privacy. Not too many people eavesdrop on cellphone calls for the content, compared to the likelihood that if a bad authentication method makes it easy for Bad Guys to clone your cellphone and make $500 calls to Bolivia which you'll refuse to pay The Phone Company for, so that's where the emphasis is. Privacy is important to some users (and there are things many people won't talk about over cellphones), but if it doesn't leak password information it's often just not a priority.
  
• Add your own issues here. There are lots of them...
  

Re:What nonsense

[Anonymous Coward]

The AP-1000 won't support 802.11A cards. You need the new AP-2000 that contains more RAM and a stronger CPU and can hold both 802.11B and 802.11A cards.

Re:5x more secure?

[jon doh!]

The fact is, security solutions aren't one-size-fits-all, and they're not something you can build a plug-n-play device around.

my netscreen firewall comes out of the box perfectly secure for most peoples needs. it allows everything out and nothing back in that wasn't requested. it's perfect for joe blow, even has a nice neat web interface for mr. blow. security out of the box CAN be designed, it just may take awhile.