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

5x more secure?

[DaveBarr]

When are we going to get a technology that's 5x more secure?

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: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).

Speed isn't why wireless is still a "toy!"

[NickV]

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!?

better solution: same hardware

[Frothy Walrus]

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.

Re:better solution: same hardware

[cmowire]

I think you are going to be seeing business users going for this first, not consumers.

This way, you can have 20 people in a conference room get decent bandwidth and response time while they are all participating in a meeting/training session/etc and still leave bandwidth free for Ed, who's network port was acting up this morning.

I'm all for 54Mbps because I /can/ hose a 10MBs connection. Well, that, and I don't have the stuff purchased yet, so I'll just wait a little bit and get the 54Mbps gear when I have the cash ready. Maybe they'll have WEP fixed by then, too. ;)

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.

What nonsense

[benploni]

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.

Bandwidth isn't what we need

[melanarchy]

"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.

Anti-soltution.. and rationale

[d.valued]

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.

Mercedes-Benz rolls out drive-by Ethernet

[A Commentor]

From infoworld: Mercedes-Benz has 802.11a in a car... Interesting article even though it was 'rejected' by /.

Mercedes-Benz showcases a car of the near future with a built-in wireless Ethernet 802.11a connection that will capture high-speed bursts of data from roadside transceivers as the car hurtles down the highway.

Laptop speeds limited

[BarefootClown]

Glad somebody else has noticed this. I have an 802.11b network at home, and another at work; I use them to keep my (and my roommates') laptop(s) on the network without having to drag 100+ feet of Cat5 around the place. Do I feel limited by using "only" 11Mbps? Hell, no! I rarely break 1Mbps--on any network. I used to use a 100Mbps wired network, with a decent NIC in my laptop (3Com hardware NIC, not a WinNIC), a decent 100MBps switch, and still rarely broke 1Mbps, even with my desktop machines running closer to 50 Mbps. Why? In short, laptops suck. Seriously--when you're looking for performance, you don't look at laptops. The hard drives are much slower than anything in a desktop, the bus speeds are slower (my laptop has a 66MHz FSB; my desktop has a 133, with DDR RAM); everything is slower and scaled back. 11Mbps is no limit to a laptop, in my experience. It would be a limit to a desktop terminal connected to the WLAN, but most people/companies don't use wireless for desktops.

Granted, we could probably saturate the WLAN if we had twenty or so people all trying to pull large files, but that condition has its own flaws: 1) how often does the situation occur--even in a meeting, with 30 people attending, how many of them are trying to pull big files at a given time (usually none...), and 2) how many clients can an access point actually handle? Most of the ones with which I'm familiar (consumer equipment, admittedly) get flaky around 20-30 people; any more, and you need another AP--add another AP, and you effectively double the bandwitdh, as you're splitting the load across two different AP's, each on a different channels. Also remember than many networks are still only 10 Mbps, because of the high infrastructure cost of upgrading a major network (particularly if recabling is required); on such a network, the bit behind the AP is already the bottleneck, so it's not that big of a deal if the WLAN is only 11Mbps.

In short, yeah, it's neat, it's cool, but it's not that big of a deal, as long as laptops don't get a major bus upgrade. A chain is only as strong as it's weakest link.

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...