Slashdot Mirror
New Phased-Array AP Boosts 802.11b Range
ttul writes "Vivato, a well-funded wireless startup, today came out of stealth mode to announce its "WiFi" switch product, a super high performance 802.11b access point that uses an array of hundreds of antennas to provide wide-area coverage to standard 802.11b clients. See stories at Wired,
and The New York Times. Vivato's new AP completely changes the economics of WiFi especially for providers such as FatPort and WayPort, who now have the technology to deliver 11Mbps to your laptop even if you're miles from a location -- it's the Jetson's, folks!"
This appears to be a dup of a story that is still on the main page... And to think, they get paid for this.
What is this, CNN's Headline news?..all the news, the same news, every half hour!
Give a hand, not a hand-out.
What if I don't want this super-array to interfere with my local WLAN? It appears that this technology has the potential to create a "mine is bigger than yours" arms race among WiFi users.
it sticks around for more than a year. The old addage of I'll beleive it when I see it has fallen victim to too many technologies that didn't make it. I am cheering for this all the way. Hope it makes it and stays.
This company will surely fail. Its technology isnt taking into account laptop joggers, laptop motorcyclists, laptop unicyclists. And leisure, urban helicopterists and skydivers...
-- -- --
Help my mini cause: My journal
They are testing one of these new access point to distribute stories. Slashdot had the antenna's pointed to the east coast when the first story was posted. Now they are aimed at the west coast. While the range of coverage for slashdot is much greater now, folks in the midwest will have to deal with the resulting duplicate packets^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hstories
The use of a phased array antenna for transmission to the client is nice, but I wonder if it requires the client to be modified to run special tracking software that sends back multipath information to the basestation to enable it to tune its beam.
This makes me think that the data-link would probably end up being asymmetric --- high data rate down to the client but not so good coming back. Not only would the upstream rate be partially consumed by the multipath measurements, but also the single antenna on the client would have a harder time beamforming out to the receiver array.
The power constraint is probably on the total output from one array and as such, the number of users that any one of them can support is probably fairly limited. This suggests that things can get quite interesting if we put a bunch of these in close quarters. The optimal solution would be for the AP to collaborate and divide up the users among them not by simple distance (voronoi regions) but by effective distance involving the specific multipath environment! Otherwise interference would be a serious problem.
use a Phased-Array AP to Boost the 802.11b Range, when you can use a Pringles Can as the Wi-Fi Antenna to Boost the Range? ;)
Fuck war driving - try war standing around and hopping on to x number of nets!
---- "Logoff! That cookie shit makes me nervous!" - A. Soprano
Slashdot was able to boost its reach of certain articles by a factor of 2. Says slashdot editor, Timothy, "The results are very impressive and the technique was surprisingly simple. All we had to do to double the readership for a particular article was to post it once in the morning, and again at night. If our /. readers are anything like the editors, most of them are too lazy to read more than the top couple of articles. If they happened to miss the morning edition of /. we can rebroadcast a "best of /." again in the evening so our lazy readers don't miss out and all the action here."
Looking for a computer support specialist for your small business? Check out
Actually, the late 1800's was when technology affected human lives (at least in America) the most.Before that time it wasn't unusual to go for years without communication to your family that was only a few hundred miles away. Then the telegraph, steam engine, mass production, the industrial revolution began to really change things.
It is an exciting time now, but don't kid ourselves that this is the golden age of advances. We're still doing the same thing, just slightly faster. Give me a call when we have anti-gravity devices, holodecks, and transporters.
What, me worry?
Don't have time to sit on a computer in a dark room? Get Pr0n on the Go! Download from the park, from your porch, or even in the car!
Maybe somebody can answer this for me, but I see a major problem with current wireless technology. I currently have an 802.11b access point in my home. I love it, and it gets great range - in fact, so great it goes clear over onto my neighbors property. I had my laptop outside (probably looked like a dork walking around running a constant ping on my thinkpad), and I was able to walk clear onto their property and get a great signal. At first I was impressed... then I started to think about my neighbor. Wouldn't this be a problem for them if they wanted their *own* access point for their network?? I would think that my access point also interferes with 2.4ghz phones in the area. As an example, I had to sell mine because they quit working the second I got this thing. So, if you could expand the range of 802.11b to *miles* - isn't that really going to screw over Joe Blow who wants his own wireless network that just happens to be within range of a provider mentioned in the story???
What use is it to have a connection "anywhere", when most conference rooms and what have you have a cord connection nearby which is infinitly more secure
First off convenience, you don't need to mess with wires. Secondly if you have the system configured right ie using the revised scheme done by the A team after the B team messed, then wireless can be more secure than ethernet. Network access can be restricted to NIC cards that are authorized to access that LAN. The basic technology was originally designed for ethernet but came out for wireless first after their 'difficulties'.
Sidenote: Perhaps this would be a good idea on airplanes...
Actually that is in the works. They are already required to be robust against microwave radiation from onboard kitchens so WiFi is not far out.
However your other comments about WiFi being on its way out suggest to me that either you have never used the technology or you are a troll.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
This must not be a duplicate from all the people getting modded down... not only are the 4,5, and 6th posters getting redundant, the first guy got a troll mod. Is this really not another story, and are the editors really awake?
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Hell, even I don't read it anymore. I just go into meta-moderation and reply at random to whatever comments come up.
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
How right you are.
Here and here, only a few hours apart.
Cost is a big reason for wanting wifi.
I'm generally suspicious of wireless (I have a semi-paranoid security perspective), but cost could be a huge consideration for me, as I'm trying to figure out how to get my apartment complex to set up high-speed internet. Between a Cogent 100Mbps connection for $1000 a month and this for a central antenna, the costs to the complex may well be able to drop from close to $100,000 for wiring it into every unit to perhaps $5000-$10,000, maybe less. That's far more reasonably in the eyes of the owners, as they can pay it off more quickly. With a little luck, we might actually even be able to get some pretty high speeds for maybe $20 a month -- and the complex might even make some decent profit with it.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
The fact that clearly no one who works at slashdot reads their site, or the fact that 2/3 of the people reading this article don't either.
;-)
FWIW, people, the replies on the story from this morning are better than these.
Apparently they didn't get slashdotted this morning, time for round two. Ding Ding Ding.
It works much like the active radar antennas that do not move. Here in Santa Monica we have a large phased array of hundreds of fixed antennas aimed at the horizon that are sequentially pulsed on and off to get the familiar 'rotating' pattern of a single rotating radar dish. This design is much more robust then a rotating array as there are no mechanical rotating parts at all...everything is switched by PIN diodes. Military jets also use a variation of this for secure communications. In the jets' wings are switched inductor antennas that are used in a fast frequency hopping scheme over a 50 mhz range. The transmissions can be anywhere within a 50 mhz frequency segment at any given fraction of a second. If the frequency synthesizer at all locations are moving to the same frequency at exactly the same time, the transmisison will sound completely continuous.
They use PIN diodes to change the taps on an inductor to resonate the antenna over the (wide) frequency range. This way, they can use smaller, lighter, narrower bandwith antennas and rapidly tune them to the exact frequency in use at any given moment.
All in all, a very slick technology and another example of a civilian use of military technology.
The advantages of a phased array AP are two:
-Multiple simultaneous beams. The maximum number of possible beams is equal to the number of radiating elements in the array. The Pringles can, of course, has only one main lobe (beam).
-Near-instantaneous beam switching from one direction to another or, said another way, the ability to track very quickly, since the beamsteering is done electrically, rather than mechanically, as the Pringles can does.
The big question I've not seen answered is, how do they handle the Wi-Fi beacons? A beacon serves multiple purposes--synchronizing the network nodes and advertising the presence of the network to prospective new network members being two of them. If the beamforming is used to reach long distances, the beam is very narrow; new nodes won't be able to detect the network since it's unlikely they'll be in the beam. Conversely, if a wide beam is used to enable new nodes to join, range to existing LAN members will suffer.
I wonder if it's significant that, in the Wired article, the tests were performed starting close to the AP, then walking away from it. It would be interesting to try the reverse...
Now I have to upgrade to phased-array chalk for my warchalking efforts!
-- ;-)
Kuro5hin.org: where the good times never end.