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802.11 vs. 3G For Mobile Access
bobdole34 writes: "A new way to give us fast mobile net access spells further trouble for 3G.Imagine being able to surf the net at speeds faster than DSL from anywhere, at any time - you could watch a live video webcast while waiting for the bus, email photos to your friends while sitting in the park, or download the MP3 of the song that's playing in the pub before it finishes. I smelled vapour until I saw a demo of MeshNetworks at 802.11Planet in Philly."
Or you could download the Two Towers before any of the Dialup or DSL bastards can get their hands on it.
Your palmpilot gets a fatter pipe than my desktop.
I hate you.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
Just because you saw a cool demo somewhere doesn't necessarily mean it STILL isn't vapourware... what if this company folds tomorrow?
sheesh, I saw tons of cool demos at linuxworlds in the past and nothing came of them!
-- Phillip Davis phil at daviszone dot org
Not only is it so fast, but it runs over conventional 802.11b. I hope this becomes widespread enough so I can get it up here in the middle of nowhere North Dakota.
The question is with wireless internet getting this fast I wonder if we'll start to see outdoor LAN parties???
Connecting things in a mesh is all good and well and certinaly more efficient - but is it efficient enough?
:)
Wireless networking occupies a relatively narrow band of the frequency spectrum, and probably less than the 3G ranges offered to telcos.
I highly doubt that an 802.11 mesh will ever provide that much bandwidth - especially once things start relaying in many directions at once.
Imagine splitting it up into cells, each one where a user is. As something transmits from one cell to the next, it'll use bandwidth (or available frequency space) in the neighbouring cells.
Anyway this could work for dense areas but screws over the people living in the country - worse still, it's not dependable. What if you need to make an emergency call and nobody is within range?
I heard nokia were wokring on a hybrid tech that allows you to use mesh networks when they are around and 3G otherwise - that would be cool
Also i could raise the usual problems of accounting for bandwidth use on this kind of net - who pays for it all?
Sure eveyone will be worried about sniffing traffic but good crypto might take care of that. What normal people are really going to care about is battery use. This is going to drain the devices battery. Will people simply opt out of the network by leaving their device off till they need it so the standby time is not cut down?
I might actually motivate and get a new cell if it came with something like this. Of course convincing the phone makers to put it in might be a little hard considering how inbed they are with the telcos. God this country is so behind in some respects. Anyway, since the telcos seem to want to charge me an arm and leg everytime I access their crappy wireless net services I would be a big fan of being able to just tie into a mesh network for cheap. Of course one wonders about the powerdrain for people leaving their phones on in their pocket/bag and having them used as routers. Can't be good for battery life. Guess I'll have to wait for fuel cells afterall.
There is no billion dollar market for wireless web services, and their won't be until it is cheap and easy to use. I.e., years from now, possibly longer.
Or they could act like the RIAA or MPAA and get it made illegal...
What we see depends on mainly what we look for. -- John Lubbock Now search for that bug slave!
In Cisco class in school, when we were learning about various topologies, my teacher was telling us about how mesh networks never work because they're too complex.
Granted she wasn't really a fountain of networking knowledge and I proved her wrong on a daily basis, but it's nice to see how wrong she can be.
This article, at UltraWideband Planet suggest that 802.11 is doomed. Perhaps most interestingly, the Ultrawideband site is from the same people that offer 802.11-Planet, Internet.com.
Yes yes. What you saw was a step up from vaporware, commonly referred to as a "dog and pony show".
All editorial writers ever do is come down from the hill after the battle is over and shoot the wounded.
Power.
Think about it. You plug a wifi card into your laptop and start surfing. Battery life cuts from 4 hours to 2.
This study examines current 802.11a solutions... chances are there will be some improvements, but it averages 100 microwatts/sec regardless of whether it's in use or not.
OTOH, 3G phones (with their tiny ickle bodies and tiny ickle batteries) consume power at 25 microwatts in TX/RX, and only 1 in idle mode.
This article talks about how 3G power is a challenge for handset manufacturers even now, designing for 3G. You think your phone is gonna be able to cope with 802.11a? You're wrong.
3G and WiFi are both cool. But they are different.
If you can't see this, click here to enable sigs.
Will they open the specs?
Didn't think so. They are looking to boost stock value in an effort to capitalize on an eventual takeover.
If they did this for the good of mankind, they would have made the code open source.
What we need is a software-reconfigurable wireless lan card that could be programmed to communicate as needed...
"Piter, too, is dead."
Mesh networks are still a dream. High speed mobile internet is here now. At $99/month, it's not quite worth it yet though, especially because you agree not to use it for your home network.
Anyone want to help me set up a WiFi network in Pitman, NJ? Somehow I doubt it.
Much more important is that in practical terms, the bandwidth of the airside isn't the limiting factor in a public-access network. In an office environment, you can get something like 3.4-4Mbit/s out of 802.11b (depending on your adapter, and on whether you are using WEP encryption). In a public-access network, you've got to pipe that down some back-haul pipe to an upstream PoP. Either you use cheap-and-cheerful 2Mbit/s DSL, and put up with contention at the DSLAM, or you pay for something like a T1/E1 with dedicated bandwidth. Even if you pay for the dedicated bandwidth, you're probably going to end up with at most 2Mbit/s shared between your active customers.
You'll have to check prices yourself, but it's difficult to see how you can make a profit unless you dimension the system for a fairly low target bandwidth, say 256kbit/s, when you cost in the bandwidth and the installation labour. That makes it much closer to 3G in practical terms - probably a bit faster and a bit cheaper, but with access restricted to hot-spots.
Before this tech. gets too far, it will have to deal with the whole "wireless security issue"... which is quite a beast.
Of course, tunnelling traffic through a proxy of some kind (VPN-style) could help matters, but it will of course affect speed.
-jbn
This has the potential to transform human society in ways we cannot even anticipate!
Imagine millions of commuters all watching Pam and Tommy Lee do their thing on the way to work in the morning! EVERY morning! My friends, we stand at the gateway to a new and better way of life for all human organisms on this ever-shrinking little old globe of ours.
The malevolent forces of evil, tyranny, poverty, stupidity, Scientology, lambda calculus, feminism, fascism, organized religion, the ASPCA, and Wizard of Oz/Pink Floyd theories will wither away like ice in a spring thaw!. THE CORPSES OF THE INIQUITOUS WILL LITTER THE STREETS! Wild dogs will gnaw the dry bones of the unrighteous! Everybody will have an above-average income and nobody will have to stay home on prom night!
Fuck a duck, man, this is heavy shit.
"Offtopic, Inflammatory, Inappropriate, Illegal, or Offensive" -- hey, that's me!
this clip is from Business 2.0:
<clip> Ultimately, however, 3G and Wi-Fi should be able to coexist. "The technology is actually very complimentary, because they are not truly competitive technologies," King says. "I expect that mobile carriers will purchase some Wi-Fi providers, and we'll start to see some integration." </clip>
Ok, first you gotta realise that 802.11b (even) by access standards is fast!
With a contention ratio of 50, and giving each user 576K you get:
11,000,000 / 576000 * 50 = 954 users
That's on a single connection, within say 100m of some user.
So even 11b can allow enormous numbers of people 'broadband' capabilities.
Secondly, that's with current technology only- a more advanced technology would allow multiple networks on the same frequency by using directional aerials- this can multiply up the usage maybe 20 times. Then there's the fact that even 11b allows atleast 3 different channels (in practice). We're talking thousands of people, potentially,in little old 1b land alone.
Anyway this could work for dense areas but screws over the people living in the country - worse still, it's not dependable.
Yes, this is the issue. WiFi is basically line of sight, or 100m range. However that's a regulatory issue, mostly. The only reason that WiFi is so restricted is due to power limits. If the users were allowed to shout louder, they would be able to go further, and then country people would be in range of each other anyway (chances are).
What if you need to make an emergency call and nobody is within range?
Cell phone? Who says WiFi is for emergency calls anyway?
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"having gone from a 5Mbs pipe to a 33.6Kbps connection I know the pain
the problem and it's a huge problem that mesh works only when you have enough people
much like haveing enough people to become econmic to install a 802.11 in a cafe
also it becomes a divide between people that have and have not i.e. those in sparsly populated areas where they wont put an arial because they dont have enough people
there are so many reasons why this will fail
there are lots of Real case studys where this type of thing failed
so vapour it's truly amazing
regards
John Jones
p.s. so tell me why this isnt just 802.11g
1. The Telcos start whining to their regulators that they are being deprived of revenue, as point-to-point trunk calls lessen for 802-based communications.
2. The wireless carriers (who still haven't found a stable, profitable business model -- i thought PacBell Wireless was bad -- until Cingular bought 'em) will join in with the trunk owners and scream that their FCC franchise is being devalued by Wireless IP Data and IP Telephony and they need government help (read: R-E-G-U-L-A-T-I-O-N) right now.
3. The Consumer Giants will whine and bitch and snivel about interference issues with 2.5 and 5 GHZ devices they make.
4. The law enforcement/intelligence community will endlessly bitch about their lack of ability to "monitor" this dangerous new technology, and how this creates a national security vulnerablity and therefore, offers a "window of opportunity" to evil-dewars. They will insist on lousy/key crypto and 1.5 bit key algorithms, and their ability to "oversee" the security of this spectrum.
4. The G, sensing the increased value of this spectrum and their ability to make even more money in licence fees and regulatory overhead will further regulate the spectrum and cause more and more expense to be made to justify their jobs and administration and regulation of it.
no wonder i don't sleep much.....
Ten quid, she's so easy to blind. And not a word is spoken...
Yahoo BB in Japan has DSL for 12Mbit downstream.
for 30 bux nontheless.
thought that's something people in the US could find interesting to drool on...
p.s. last i checked, 802.11 speeds drops off drastically when
* distance between nodes gets far
* many people sharing freq. spectrum
and 3G is nowhere NEAR the m-bit speeds on an individual basis.
so yeah... sticking w/ DSL for all my pr0n needs.
My life in the land of the rising sun.
Also, is a collection of links on mobile routing protocols, and mesh routing protocols that were originally designed for wired backbone links.
Not just 802.11, but any radio frequency without encryption is interesting. Its too easy to take a tuner out of an existing device and hook it up to a slightly modified radio to extract the data. A computer can automate the scanning and recording process. With highly directional antennas, the location and identity of the source can easily be determined too. Any kid with a lot of free time can do this with junk parts. It doesn't take a college degree.
If it isn't encrypted, those communications are subject to eavesdropping. No law, not even the death penalty is going to protect a person from a breach of privacy. Only strong physical security is our friend.
for widespread roaming use is this...
It's in an ISM band.
So... there is no guaranteet that once your company has rolled out it's 802.11b infrastructure city wide, that something else can't interfere with it. They don't hold a license for the spectrum. My cordless phone can smash it, and they can't do anything about it. Other can set it up as well.
"A new way to give us fast mobile net access spells further trouble for 3G.Imagine being able to surf the net at speeds faster than DSL from anywhere, at any time"
I could imagine that, except I can't get DSL out here, and likely won't be able to at least until the end of the decade. I'm assuming you mean by very limited definitions of "anywhere." More like "anywhere you would care to be."
"you could watch a live video webcast while waiting for the bus,"
"Bus" = "Public transport" = "population density" = "not me."
"email photos to your friends while sitting in the park,"
"Park?" Another one of those things that suggests population density. See, out here we have these things called "back yards"...
"I smelled vapour until I saw a demo of MeshNetworks at 802.11Planet in Philly."
802.11 is a wireless LAN technology. Do I need to remind you what the "L" in "LAN" stands for? Rigging up local transceivers for a single building is a heck of a lot simpler (and cheaper) than an entire city. And that's only for you folks that live in cities (read "for those of you that matter" as far as just about everybody seems to be concerned, even on here).
On the other hand, 3G is essentially a WAN technology, with its much wider tranceiving radius. It may be a cold day in Hell before BellSouth gets off their good-for-nothing behinds to upgrade the local switches for DSL (let alone somebody setting up 802.11 WAPs every few hundred feet along US 90... not that I live close enough to 90 to begin with...), I at least have some access to Sprint's network out here.
I'm sorry, but trying to say that 802.11 can and will compete with G3 is like saying that Gigabit Ethernet is going to edge out the T-3 market.
Oh, and before somebody brings up how Canada has DSL "everywhere" with their larger land mass and smaller population, ever wonder why the United States seems to have twice as many meters of paved highways per person than Canada? Maybe because the Canadian population isn't as dispersed as the American population?
If you turn it off, you aren't participating in the mesh. Don't think that is a realistic option.
Maybe a low power setting would work, though.
Little flakey, yes, but it also offers the opportunity to place "commodity" repeaters wherever you have poor signal. Much cheaper than adding another WAP.
It might be worth it to recharge batteries a lot more often to provide router service in exchange for always on, zero per-minute cost high-bandwidth mobile data access.
Tech Public Policy stuff
Color me dubious. The primary power drain is the _antenna_, at least on modern 802.11 cards. If you start cutting power to the antenna, you will start losing range. A better antenna design can offest this loss to a degree, but it is very expensive to manufacture extremely high quality antennas. What I can see is an adaption of the 802.11 that steps back your transmit power when you aren't using it to its fullest extent. There's no reason really to transmit at the full 11mbit when you're just sending HTTP Get requests and you're 5 feet from the basestation. If this is the case with the TI chip, then additional miniturization will not help your power consumption much. In fact the current jump would matter much less than the new sophisticated power control circutry added to the design.
I read the internet for the articles.
Having looked over and drooled over some of the latest, greatest wireless offerings such as ATT's "mlife", I got to the point where I read exactly how much they charge for the service. They are kidding with these pound-me-in-the-ass prices for data, aren't they?
Here is a great technology just waiting to be used, and they brag bout downloadable games and video and music and they best they can manage is $12.50 for 2MB of data per month? Isn't all the data coming from/going to the phone digital data anyway? At least it's cheaper (and better) than the Palm VII's Palm.net service and that was cool in its day was well.
The more power to the people who start these mesh networks, the better. Prices need a little bit more downward pressure.
I tried every decent and legal way I could think of to resolve the issue w/the business before I rented the chicken suit
It amazes me how people think of such things.
Anyone with experience in WAN coverage for Motient/Mobitex/RAM/ARDIS/Cingular/CDPD (whatever those groups are calling themselves this week) realizes that COVERAGE is KEY.
A convention center trade show painted with WiFi is not greater NYC. Just because you can surf the web with your laptop while on the second floor toilet in your house it does not mean you can scale outside your teeny D-Link range.
Let me guess - people will actually care to use a patchwork system that will have gaping holes every 1000ft or so. Yeah, sounds like a real world enterprise solution to me.
Get it straight - WiFi in the warehouse - WAN everywhere else (except the desolate Dakotas....).
10 MD
The Mesh Networks Inc protocols are proprietary.
e r.ht ml.
.11 power management is to put the radio in sleep mode (and run the sleep protocol with the AP). This has not been a competitive focal point, but vendors are starting to improve.
.11 radios that are just starting to hit retail channels can operate on both the 11b and 11a bands and with both the 11b and a/g OFDM codecs. The prices for 11a nic cards is under $100 now (79?) and the a/b/g nic cards won't be far behind.
They are a byproduct of military-funded tactical
radio R&D. There is an emphasis onself-organizing topology and route discovery. If every soldier and vehicle is lugging a radio, then the network
has a good chance of continuing to operate even if parts of it are destroyed.
This kind of mesh does have some pathology.Take some number, say 10, of nodes placed in a straight
line. You are at one end of the line and the internet ISP is at the other end. And you have
10 wireless hops between you and the internet. And the people in the middle of the line may not be really happy with you either.
There are non-proprietary approches. Check out the ietf MANET working group at
http://www.ietf.org.html.charters/manet-chart
There are numerous university projects. Try Google(mesh network & university)
or Google(mobile network & university).
There have been numerous failed startup company attempts at mesh networks. One approach that I found very appealing used a self-organizing mesh
that organized itself into rooted tree structures.
The internal tree branches served as backhaul connections to the internet. The leaves represent the clients/users. The internal nodes are not mobile. They are devices to be installed on utility poles or public access locations. They find one another and create an uplink/downlink
infrastructure where uplink means a path to the ISP or other wired infrastructure and downlink
means to the client. I liked this approach because it builds a predictible structure that
can be analyzed and because the routing procedures
within the internal nodes are a lot simpler
than in the completely unconstrained mesh network.
The tree-like organization also seems to avoid
another conceptual problem with the fully
unconstrained network which is bandwidth sharing.
If you are a client in a full mesh, your node
must accept routing traffic from other nodes.
Thus a goodish portion of your bandwidth and battery power may be consumed by traffic going
through your client - but it's not your traffic.
I'd guess that most people would not want to act
as a router and be draining power pretty much
fulltime. Makes more sense to have a wireless
self-organizing infrastructure that can provide
bandwidth to clients that cruise within range.
There were a few misleading comments about power
in earlier emails. Cell phones typical draw
about 2 watts when transmitting. That exceeds
the current capacity of the battery. They actually charge a capacitor from the battery between time slots and drain the capacitor during transmission. 802.11 devices have lower peak current drains, and they continue to get better. The most important technique in
Next-generation
I think it is important to point out that 11b only has 3 channels to operate in. That doesn't give you much routing diversity when you need a lot of overlapping transmitters to create a useful (and thus redundant) mesh. But when you add 11a and can use the higher bandwidth ofdm codec in either the 11a bands or in the 11b bands (where they call it 11g), then you have more than a dozen channels that can be operating simultaneously. It seems obvious to me that this kind of channel diversity will be needed to successfully deploy a good mesh.
Do you expect anyone in a huge company, who mostly uses the Internet for porn and ebay to understand why anyone would want to plug in a laptop? Verizon gets close. AT&T wants us to turn Japanese, Nextel wants us to be truckers, and Singlular... as far as I can tell, Singlular wants us to be gay.
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
I expect smaller mom and pop wireless ISPs will lead the big players to the fount of wisdom by example, and the ones that drink from it will prosper. This is just like the first ISP boom all over again - a lot of smaller actors get on stage and fight it out and then the big ones eat the surviving small ones with viable business models, paying customers and cool buzzwords.
Money for nothing, pix for free