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Future of Wi-Fi
An anonymous reader writes "BusinessWeek looks at the The high hurdles facing Wi-Fi. Sure it's got promise but if overcrowded spectrum isn't destined to crimp its growth, it'll need better technology and regulatory help from the FCC."
The writeup is right; the FCC will need to give Wi-Fi a chance before it catches on. And the FCC won't, because the money-rich and power-hungry wireless companies and other broadcasting firms always manage to win somehow. If the FCC were interested in crawling out from beneath the desk of Big Business, then Wi-Fi would already be in motion.
Cretin - a powerful and flexible CD reencoder
Oh yes please...get the Feds involved...everything they deal with turns golden, and smells nice too!!! Maybe RIAA has a few points to add to the mix as well. Stir in a Congressional sub committee or two, mention that pr0n will fill the airwaves, and you gotch yoself a recipe for a WINNING standard.
Perhaps if the WiFi boxes sold to Joe Consumer didn't allow Just Anyone to use the gateway it wouldn't be a problem? Say, by silently rejecting non-approved MAC addresses, or by adding an HTTP 'login to use this proxy transparently for a few hours' layer on port 80 (to enable a limited-time session on that MAC).
Those who don't want to sacrifice the ultimate in convenience (walk in to a friend's place and have their laptop be online, instantly), will have to accept that there are commensurate secutiry risks.
Convenient or Secure: be it in WiFi or OS or even *gasp* Real Life, it's always a trade off....
.f00Dave
I think this article reads too much into current Wi-Fi. All these people say that this and this needs to be done for Wi-Fi for it to grow, but it is growing at a furious pace already.
I think they overestimate what the current Wi-Fi is for. It is so limited, than market demand will certainly open up new avenues for wireless networking. This is how the tech industry is. Don't expect to be buying the same ol' 802.11b technology that you use today in three years - it won't happen. We always have new stuff.
That's what I hate about articles like this - they always state all the things wrong with a technology that we already know about, and they forget that when the demand rises for high-scalability and secure networks, then something will come to the rescue. If we can't get more bandwidth from the FCC, then they will have to figure out someway to get more out of the bandwidth.
I use Wi-Fi for what it is made for TODAY: medium to small networks where security is not paramount and mobility is.
And I, for one, will watch the great economy work and create new solutions as people are willing and needing to buy them.
Moon Macrosystems. Sun's biggest competitor.
I will probably get beaten down for this, but it seems to me that integrating encryption directly into the media is probably not the right approach for this. There _are_ systems that do work rather well. Let's take, for instance, a system like they have in hotels, where you have to log into a web page before you are even routed. Combine this with the simple rule of "never put your wireless net behind your main firewall" and you can sleep a little better at night.
Design a system that has protections beyond something built into the media. The medias function is _not_ to provide security, but rather to communicate.
-- Who is the bigger fool? The fool or the fool who follows him? --
I recently drove to ohio from the minneapolis, long drive, with me and several of my friends, well, I brought my laptop and a fairly decent sized antena (omni 8) when we got near a city, it'd connect and i'd check my email every few hours, and have maybe 10-20 minutes of uninterupped internet access. from the hotel, i could use an access point either in the hotel, or from the business acrossed the street (the business had a bigger pipe) and the same scenario on the way home... This is a step closer to uninteruppted access, however the spectrum is fairly clogged, and you get a lot of interference, and many people like me who want free net access. After these bugs are worked out, the only thing we have to worry about is me watching divx while driving... "Oh I love this par...*screech ka-boom*"
--fetch daddy's blue fright wig, i must be handsome when i release my rage
Hmm. I'm reading that same article. Also over your Wi-Fi connection. Thanks. It IS pretty cool.
I don't mean to be flamed for this (although I know I will be), but USA is a democracy right? In fact, many on /. have been bold enough to say the BEST democracy in the world. A democracy is:
/.ers who have.
1. Government by the people, exercised either directly or through elected representatives.
2. A political or social unit that has such a government.
3. The common people, considered as the primary source of political power.
4. Majority rule.
5. The principles of social equality and respect for the individual within a community.
Now on that basis why do you feel that "every time the governemt decides to regulate something, the average person usually ends up getting screwed"?
It doesn't make sense. Either your government is that greatest in the world or they are sold-out money grabbing pigs. You can't have both.
Anonym1ty, I know you never said that the American government is the greatest, I'm just using your post as a point to other
Flame on.
sin(6cos(r)+5A)
You should look up "Shannon's Law" if you really want a detailed answer to your question. In essence, the reason you can't put an unlimited number of bits into a sine wave is that the bandwidth prevents you from changing the signal too rapidly, and the noise floor prevents you from changing it by too small an amount (if you try to indicate the difference between 0 and 1 by too tiny of a change in the sine wave, the receiver will not be able to distinguish them from the natural fluctuations in the signal).
/N )
Shannon created a mathematical formula which describes precisely how much information you can transmit given a certain bandwidth and a certain amount of noise.
Precisely:
C = W log2(1 + S
C = capacity (bits/second)
W = bandwidth ( hertz )
S/N = signal to noise ratio
This isn't a contest between the evil corporate overlords, their minions at the FCC, and the freedom loving 802.11 users. Lots of people use the radio spectrum, for business, government, military, public safety, research and personal uses. One of the roles of the FCC is to coordinate and allocate the RF spectrum to the many competing uses in the public interest. The RF spectrum is a shared resource. That means that you can't expect the FCC to give you big chunks of unshared spectrum just because you want them.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat