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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."
I keep saying it, if one company would make this cheap it wouldn't be just a toy. Cost is the main problem with wireless, and why I haven't adopted it.
*YET*
:)
oh, so the 802.11B that i'm using at home now is not real? excuse me, but... it works. its good. and even if i do have to be a wireless nazi about who gets in, it is a working feasible technology.
and cost wise... since i'm using an apple powerbook, the card is only $99
oh and by the way, the airport cards they're shipping now are 128bit capable. (no software yet...)
but it works just fine for me.
It's not speed that makes wireless a toy. It's the cost! I don't consider an 11mbps wireless connection a "toy" and if it wasn't for the costs associated, I'd jump on right now.
Come on, seriously... alot of us are still on 10mbps connections to the Internet. 11mbps is far from a toy, and the speed bump will be nice but that's NOT the issue. 54mbps, 11mbps... who cares! what about the cost!?
i agree that 802.11a, at 54Mbps, is quite powerful, but i think the consumer would prefer an easier upgrade path: 802.11a requires entirely different hardware from 802.11 because it uses 5GHz instead of 2.5GHz. seeing as 99% of us cannot hose a 10Mbps ethernet for more than a few minutes at a time, i don't think the extra speed is going to justify to the consumer the cost of re-buying all the expensive hardware (new base station, new cards, new range-extender antennas, etc).
who knows, the market will decide. but i don't see it catching on in the next two years, at least.
The whole premise of this story is wrong. 802.11b is NOT a toy; it a very useful technology. 11Mb/s is not to be sneezed at. Who are you kidding? 99% of network apps are thrilled to run at that speed.
Second, 802.11a has issues of its own. Most importantly, it is WAY shorter range, and can be blocked by a wet piece of paper. 802.11b is so robust, people have run over several miles (with special antennas).
More importantly, networking is *infrastucture* and displacing infrastructure is hard. All those laptops with builtin 802.11b arent going away. Neither are all those deployed Access points.
I forsee 802.11b having continued success, at even cheaper prices.
"wireless a possible alternative instead of a neat item to play with."
I feel that the biggest downside to current wireless is not the speed, which even at the 6.0mbps that I was getting in a lecture hall this morning while I was in #coverage in slashnet being obsessive about today's crash, but the range. Just under 500ft away I was getting 0% reception. Most people use very little bandwidth the majority of the time they are using any sort of networking and in most cases it is reliability rather then speed that is the limiting factor. Intel's site doesn't say anything about an increase in range only in speed, and as nice it will be to be able to stream audio, video, and serve a webpage over a wireless connection I do not really see the need for 55mbps over 11mbps.
When we start to see antenna's that are more then just useless screens and reliability without line of site is when you'll see more of a push to wireless.
The trick is to know your technology - if you want security, use a secure medium!
Even if your physical layer is insecure (which will invariably be the case with this sort of technology), you can always implement security at higher layers. Don't want someone to know you're transmitting pr0n? Then encrypt it at both ends at the transport layer (ever heard of https??).
Please, someone enlighten me as to why, exactly, 802.11 in itself has to be secure!
I dunno... What do you wanna do?
this new technology will really make wireless a possible alternative instead of a neat item to play with.
What a stupid thing to say. I use wireless on a regular basis, and I don't consider it a neat toy at all. It's a very real, very effective tool. Similarly, I could pretend that all your "fast ethernet" is just a toy in comparison to myrinet.
- Because Joe Home User has no hope of being able to set up and use IPsec securely anytime soon
- Because IPsec does almost nothing to help protect your system or network from attack. (so what you have no cleartext data for someone to sniff? Someone can still hack your lan and your system)
- Because there's an immense installed base of devices and systems with no IPsec support
- Because there's more to the world than IP
Joe Home user shouldn't have to be a network security export in order to use wireless technology safely. We need technologies that you can turn on and are safe out of the box. Has years of unsecure crap out of the box from Microsoft so warped our sense of reality and truth?Unless you happen to be some kind of alien (or corporate) super-genius, you can't just take a 5 GHz antenna, slap it onto a 2.4 GHz transmitter, repackage it, and call it 802.11a.
First off, the componants for a 5GHz transmitter need to be (and are) smaller than the componants for a 2.4GHz system. This is why 2.4GHz phones and 802.11b cards have effective antennas within such a small form factor, and this is also why 11a cards have greater range. The antenna that can be fit into a Type II or CF slot would provide approx. a 10 dB gain (or double the effective radiated power) of the 2.4 antenna. (Besides that, a 5 GHz signal can be sent from a 2.4 GHz antenna with a little shrinking for that gain.)
The reason the transmitter is smaller is that the signal is much more easily affected by the environment, and by shrinking the distances between componants (and the componants themselves) one reduces that possibility.
In addition, the hardware has to be capable of handling the increased thoroughput. If you put a 100baseTX card on a Cat4 based network, it ain't gonna get you full bandwidth; likewise, a 10baseT on a Gigabit Ethernet connection can't do squat. 11a's guts are different from 11b's.
Also... about security in wireless: Let's make this clear. Any form of broadcast-based system, be it wired (like Ethernet) or wireless (802.11x), IS VULNERABLE TO EAVESDROPPING. Security has to be made application-level, like IPsec, SSL, SSH, and not hardware level. Especially if everyone has access to (sufficiently similar) hardware.
I used to be someone else. Now I'm someone better.
Real life is underrated.
Because Joe Home User has no hope of being able to set up and use IPsec securely anytime soon
Good point. But...
Because IPsec does almost nothing to help protect your system or network from attack. (so what you have no cleartext data for someone to sniff? Someone can still hack your lan and your system)
How exactly are they going to be hacking the LAN? Grabbing IP addresses? That can be fixed... Nothing will be 100% but at least it'll be much much better than it is now.
Because there's an immense installed base of devices and systems with no IPsec support
Sure is... But...
Because there's more to the world than IP
No there isn't. Least not anything that I care about... But seriously - what other protocols do you think are important today?
Of course Joe Home User is going to be screwed but IPSec can be simplified extensively it shouldn't be a problem. The devices that don't support IPSec are almost worthless to Joe Home User so just toss 'em. Have an Ad-Hoc network using IPSec with Windows and they should be fine. Sure people without any brains or interest will have problems but what else is new? If they get hacked and their data is important they'll pay someone to fix it.
As I understand it IPSec can solve most of the security problems. Sure it would be nice if the specs were updated for 802.11b and new firmware was released to fix this security prolems but *RIGHT NOW* there isn't anything else. What are *YOU* going to do right now to stop people from sniffing your WEP encoded passwords (in my case my password is in cleartext when sent to my UW IMAP server, of course I'm moving to something else but in the meantime)...
I would agree that 802.11* security needs to be greatly enhanced but in the meantime IPSec is a viable option for many people. And it is a available right now.
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. "Joe User" would do far better to understand the technology around him and manage it himself, rather than keep shelling out $200 every 2-3 months because the latest hardware that was marketed as being so secure all the sudden isn't.
Yeah, it means accepting a little responsibility for yourself, and it requires some effort. But the machines are here to stay, and the sooner people become educated in the fundamentals of secure communications, the sooner they'll regain some degree of control over their lives.
"Joe User" isn't as stupid as lazy as you think. It's just that nobody has convinced him why he should care about secure communications, or explained it a way that he can understand. Educating the public has never been very high on the tech community's priority list.
If you want to do something really worthwhile, instead of waiting for MegaCorp XYZ to design the wireless card with technology that will protect dumb old "Joe" without requiring him to do any thinking at all, how about sitting down with him, explain the dangers of unsecure communications, make analogies that he can relate to, show him how using _Free,_Open_Source_ solutions can solve his problems, and teach him how to use the tools necesasary to take care of himself.
Remember: Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.
Because Linus lives in the US, and Linux is thus distributed from the US, and until relatively recently, it wasn't legal to put IPsec source on a public FTP server in the US.
Now it appears to be legal, assuming you follow particular procedures, and kernel.org does explicitly say that they are hosting crypto software now. I guess the kernel development process hasn't caught up to reality yet.
"How can you claim that you are anti-crack, while still writing a window manager?" — Metacity README
I never thought 802.11b was that slow. I've been using it for my laptop since February, and at 11 megabits, it's plenty fast enough IMO. Sure, it's not 100 MB/sec but it is wireless...
If you're refering to range issues (eg, an alternative for more broad coverage), then I'll agree. But for home and office intranet usage, 802.11b is more than suitable. Even with cable/xDSL/T1, it's considerably faster than your external connection anyway...
The one really good thing that might come of this IMO is that 802.11b products may go way down in price once the faster alternative is made available...
NGWave - Fast Sound Editor for Windows
So, the simple solution is to use VPN, if you need it to be that secure. Only one open port on a cisco PIX, which most folks hang directly off the net anyway. Easy solution. If you need security, do something like that, or don't use 802.11x.
> However, when you use a wireless network, you have no choice but to hang a cable out your window.
Ummm... no... try again. If you only have WEP as your security, and aren't able to setup anything more secure, you are basiclly opening the bloody window.
But offices are much different - wiring cubicles for Cat5 and running it back to a phone closet costs money, and hubs that can provide management services (for lots of users) as opposed to simple dumb hubs also costs money, and reconnecting the things every time you play the Shrinking Cubicle Space Game costs money. Especially now that wireless cards are $100 heading for ~$50, and good laptop 100baseT cards are $40, if you're not loading your network heavily, wireless is a big win.
It's not as strong a case if you're in a file-server-intensive environment, but for typical corporate use, 10 Mbps is enough for a lot of users doing email, printing, and web browsing plus their desktop-based apps. (Of course you'd run 100Mbps for a wired network, now that it's as cheap as 10Mbps.)
Wireless is also a really convenient approach for office telephones, as long as they don't interfere with wireless data connections, cell phones, microwave ovens, .... Eliminating Moves/Adds/Changes for phones is a big win.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
...we would all share and enjoy secure communication. Everyone focuses on Tunnel Mode ipsec without paying attention to other possibilities in the specification. Linux FreeS/WAN, the BSD's, and even Win2K all support both Tunnel and Transport Mode ipsec, why don't more people use this stuff? Though, honestly, why the FreeW/AN folks don't use a standard IKE daemon for key exchange is beyond me....
I guess we'll all have to wait for IPV6 before this stuff becomes ubiquitous. But there's really no reason why an end user need worry about secure communications across the internet. If everyone had the infrastructure (local daemons) for key exchange and ipsec it would be entirely hidden from the user and totally secure point to point. No more need for wrapping various protocols through SSL pipes... which is an obnoxious hack IMO. The ipsec guys have it right. Setting up a secure communication point to point should be completely transparent to the end user, and given ubiquitous support ipsec would be just that simple.
So your "Average Joe" argument is worthless. Your second argument about securing local systems is beside the point and not relevant to secure communications across an insecure network. Your third point that there is already a huge installed base of IPV4 systems without ipsec support is, unfortunately, the truth. The point that "there is more to the world than IP" is yet another meaningless statement. There is more to the world than a woman, beer, and dinner. But I'm not about to turn down dinner with Guinness and a date anytime soon.
JMO,
--Maynard