IEEE Standards Board Passes 802.16a

papason writes "Welcome the birth of the IEEE's first wireless MAN standard for broadband wireless access in bands ranging from 2GHz to 11GHz. Yes, the same group that brought you 802.11b has brought you a real broadband wireless access standard. See wirelessman.org for more details."

Comments

Why must MAN always come before WOMAN?

[Anonymous Coward]

When will that wireless WOMAN standard come out?

Re:Why must MAN always come before WOMAN?

[ArcCoyote]

MAN didn't always come before woman. Before the term MAN was coined there was the Metropolitan Area Ethernet. MAE West (and MAE East) anyone?

Re:Why must MAN always come before WOMAN?

[eah]

...Not enough foreplay, usually.

Wireless

[oateater]

Will this increse the range and quality/speed of the wireless internet then?

Re:Wireless

[Anonymous Coward]

I assume so. 802.11 (both a and b, I think) was originally intended for wireless connectivity in smaller areas. However, due to the increasing demand for wireless coverage on a wider scale, we're seeing this standard get perverted and hacked on to accomplish this. A standard created for this purpose alone would help quite a bit.

Re:Wireless

[Anonymous Coward]

What "wireless Internet"? If anything, a wireless MAN standard is a step toward creating such a thing in the first place. But it's going to be tough sledding against the established wireless phone operators who are coming at the same thing from a different direction.

Re:Wireless

[c.emmertfoster]

No, only adherence to standards and a widespread adoption of such hardware will increase the quality and speed of the wireless internet.

Internet Explorer still has a market majority of browsers and has for years jizzed in the face of standards. People to lazy and companies to complacent too bitch have for years accepted this. As another example, BETA videotapes were a "standard" for about five minutes.

Standards are meaningless unless implemented properly and widely accepted by a consumer base.

Re:Wireless

[CityZen]

So that's one small step for MAN... ?

Re:Wireless

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh yeah, IE's awful. Not like that highly-compliant alternative, Netscape. Whoo, there was a fine example of standards compliance. Boy, we'd have never gotten over that web adoption hurdle without the twin abortions of blink tags and JavaScript.

As another example, Beta wasn't actually superior except in highly technical tests which measured differences that were generally undetectable even by experts in the field. Do some "urban legends" Google searches if you don't believe me. Or don't, you're still wrong.

By the way, try reversing your usage of "to" and "too". A little standard we call "the English language" doesn't appreciate being jizzed on that way. TIA.

Re:Wireless

[c.emmertfoster]

By the way, try reversing your usage of "to" and "too". A little standard we call "the English language" doesn't appreciate being jizzed on that way.

Yeah, sorry about that. There should be a moderation option for "-1, Drunk."

Great, now only if my ISP cared.

[Kethinov]

I use a wireless ISP at home as it is my only form of broadband. From my perspective, wireless is great! I've loved it since day one. It kicks the crap out of satellite.. I can actually play games now with a decent ping!

But the problem is, my ISP is cheap. 100% stingy. All of the some 200 people who use this little local service are shoved onto a single IP. Yep. My IP is used by 200 people. That's so much fun when some stupid kid using my internet service gets everyone IP banned from some service.

Furthermore, when some fool decides to put his entire hard drive out for grabs on Kazaa, everyone on the network suffers. Our service is subject to frequent bottlenecks and complete downages regularly .

My ISP hasn't given a crap about the standards for years and I don't see that changing anytime soon. :(

Re:Great, now only if my ISP cared.

[Kurt Russell]

Furthermore, when some fool decides to put his entire hard drive out for grabs on Kazaa, everyone on the network suffers. Our service is subject to frequent bottlenecks and complete downages regularly

SCORE 1 RIAA

Dude, the Riaa is using special ops to bust you!
Do not fall for this! You Have Been Warned!

Re:Great, now only if my ISP cared.

[/dev/trash]

Leave. Why pay them for shitty service?

Re:Great, now only if my ISP cared.

[Kethinov]

Has your ISP ever heard of traffic shaping?

*Hangs head* My ISP uses MS DOS on their servers. They also claim to be incapable of capping user's bandwidth. Leave. Why pay them for shitty service?

It's either this, dialup, or satellite. I play games, so low ping is a priority. Since dialup is bad pings and satellite is even worse, I'm stuck with what I'm on.

Re:Great, now only if my ISP cared.

[Anonymous Coward]

Where the hell do you live, East Bumfuckistan? These people have got to have some form of configurable network equipment involved, not just a 286 running Dos 3.3; tell me more, you've captured my interest.

Re:Great, now only if my ISP cared.

[Tripster]

Why not offer to help them out, a small 200 seat ISP probably isn't making a whole lotta moola but if it improves YOUR speed that's all that matters :)

I'd start with a nice Linux box at the front end to handle gateway, firewall and transparent squid duties, you won't need to get overly fancy, especially if you skip the cache (although it would really be in their best interests).

For a couple G in hardware you could likely save them 25% in bandwidth at the proxy, plus you could use iptables etc. for traffic shaping, throttle using iptables or squid, etc.

I've done it, I've installed 2 headend gateways for small cable/wireless ISPs here in BC, works like a dream and it does save about 25% at the proxy. Mind you, they also have the luxury of being able to throttle users at the cable modem, so they only offer 384/128 service residentially but it beats dialup, although they also own the only dialup service in town too.

Re:Great, now only if my ISP cared.

[Anonymous Coward]

How exactly do you share an IP? Does the ISP do some sort of NAT that maps MAC addresses?

Re:Great, now only if my ISP cared.

[Oculus Habent]

All home customers are on a private IP space, business customers get live IPs. Not that it helps much of anything. Come 4pm, my 300k line slows down to 56k or worse. But there's very little else available in rural Maine.

Re:Great, now only if my ISP cared.

[Anonymous Coward]

Side note for you:

Apparently Airolink is in talks with Cianbro, who started expanding into wireless service.

Airolink is tiny, run out of (and on the same billing system) as Champions Gym. The receptionist for Airolink is the Champions receptionist. Some of their towers are WAY over acceptable decibel levels (one blocks out my access point from in front of my house) and they have very little bandwidth to the Internet. The sad thing is they have enough low-bandwidth users (mostly business in Waterville) that they maintain decent profit for the service they offer.

If Cianbro ends up buying them, there may be better service in our future, but don't look too hopeful

Re:Great, now only if my ISP cared.

[lvdrproject]

My dad runs a dial-up ISP, and is currently in the process of setting up high-speed wireless access across a good third or so of Iowa, and i can tell you, it's expensive. We're talking tens of thousands of dollars, just for the antennas that have to go on the water towers. Now multiply that by two or three, in our case, because we need multiple antennas on multiple towers to get such a huge coverage area. So we're already up in the ~60 or 70 thousand dollars range, and we haven't even started selling our service yet. Plus the fact that getting an OC-3/T3/whatever your line is (we happen to be using two "OC-3s" worth of bandwidth right now, which is upgradeable to like, 24 OC-12s worth) is really expensive. So what are we at now? Like ~60 or 70 thousand, plus however many dozen thousands of dollars a dedicated line from Qwest or UUNet or whatever costs (not sure on the exact price of that). And we still haven't sold any wireless accounts. Now the customers need wireless modems. $350 a piece. At $5 a month to lease them, we're losing money on the modems for almost 6 years. Plus, if you want customers (in our case, again), you want to keep all your prices below Mediacom's cable prices (which are currently horrible, by the way), but you also need those low prices to correspond to speeds comparable to cable. That puts you in the hole a bit too, because providing such high-speed access at such low prices is really really difficult.

I don't know, maybe your ISP is genuinely horrible. I couldn't say. But try to think about all that stuff next time you say a wireless service doesn't give a crap. It's really hard to set all this stuff up, and really hard to find some middle ground between price and speed.

Re:Great, now only if my ISP cared.

[marshac]

A wireless 'modem' is $350? If 'your' ISP is anything like most of the other wireless ISPs out there, you're also using 802.11b. This makes me wonder, why are you paying so much for your wireless NICs? Last I checked, you could get a good 802.11b PCI nic with an external antenna port for $100. Shoot, you can buy one of the more expensive WAPs for $350 these days.

If you're not using 802.11b, then ignore everything I said =)

Re:Great, now only if my ISP cared.

[Anonymous Coward]

You sir are a jackass. Go back to irc, or "mIRC", or whatever you kids are calling it nowadays. Wireless isp, ha! You'll soon be bankrupt and on the streets, and your daddys oc-whatever will be disconnected for lack of payment.

But seriously, lavender, you should really have your dad read "building community wireless networks". Great book. Especially the part about why wireless ISPs are (currently) doomed to failure.

Re:Great, now only if my ISP cared.

[lvdrproject]

I'm not sure. The transceiver itself is $300, and then the external antenna is like $50. I can get more detailed information later, i don't have it on me right now. Most of the antennas themselves (the ones on the water towers) don't actually operate on 2.4 GHz (à la 802.11b), but i think the wireless NICs themselves do. Not sure. We use Lucent/whoever-makes-it-now Orinoco cards at home, they're not that expensive either, but they're all in the house, no externals required.

Re:Great, now only if my ISP cared.

[lvdrproject]

"IRC", that's what us kids (the ones that know what the fuck they're talking about) call it nowadays. My dad has quite enough money to fail on this endeavour, but thank you for your sincere concern. Even if this whole thing puts us out of tens of thousands of dollars, we have that to spend. I'm not worried about it, he seems pretty confident. And i'll research on that book, just to see what you're talking about. But i'm thinking my dad's ass is pretty well covered. He has two "OC-3s" running right now, and he only has a few thousand dial-up users. He has bandwidth to share, and money to spend. And Mediacom (the cable company here) offers horrible cable service for around $100 per month (including modem leasing). Their service totally dies at night, when everyone gets home from school/work, and their speeds are horrible at any time. Their latency is even worse: game play is almost impossible. I know a few people that would probably give up the slightly higher speeds of cable and downgrade to 128-kbit wireless if they had decent pings. kthxbai suh

Another 802.16 Article

[Strike]

Here is a story detailing a potential clash between 802.11[ab] and the new .16 standard. Interesting stuff.

Re:Another 802.16 Article

[Strike]

No, here it is: http://www.commsdesign.com/story/OEG20030130S0055 Maybe I'll click HTML instead of Plain old text next time.

summary of what exactly 802.16a will do anyone?

[Anonymous Coward]

the subject says it all.

Re:summary of what exactly 802.16a will do anyone?

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe it's some sort of hovercraft.

Re:summary of what exactly 802.16a will do anyone?

[Anonymous Coward]

nah man. it's some sort of law enforcemnt device involving a water heater and valentines day. and luggage. no. wait. i'm playing pictionary. nevermind.

Re:summary of what exactly 802.16a will do anyone?

[Anonymous Coward]

I know what this is....this is an espresso machine. No, no wait. It's a snow cone maker. Is it a water heater?

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

IEEE Standards Board Passes 802.16a

[Amsterdam Vallon]

... gets two-hundred bucks, and moves onto 802.16b ...

Re:IEEE Standards Board Passes 802.16a

[dmanny]

Been doing a lot of meta mods lately. Hope I get the one that put you as off topic as I disagree. Perhaps the moderation was mistaken. I got a well deserved meta mod myself recently that I made for someone's post off topic when it was humorous. I think that I did not catch that the pulldown changed when I tried to scroll down with the wheel mouse.

Anyway I found your post funny and others have put it to +2. Someone should work up a set of explanations for the letter modifiers, 'a' for almost, b for basic, etc.

Although the odds are not good anyway, I probably won't get to meta-mod this because I posted.

We have enough fucking standards....

[Anonymous Coward]

..how about affordable and easily obtainable access at the lesser standards we've had for years!

Re:We have enough fucking standards....

[Shoten]

That's not the realm of the organizations mentioned here. It's not within their power or realm of responsibility to force deployment of standards, nor does it make sense for them to hold back on development of better standards until the older ones are heavily used. What if the older standard isn't as useful as predicted?

And finally, WHAT standard? What lesser standard exists for MAN (Metropolitan-Area-Networks, a far cry from anything you can do with 802.11x) over wireless signals? This isn't like something you'll use on your home network, this is the wireless equivalent of a SONET ring.

um.. Typo?

[Derg]

From the site:NEW! IEEE 802.16a approved as IEEE standard on 29 January 2002! [emphasis mine]

I do so hope that is a typo.. or this isnt really news... on the assumption that this is new, and that is supposed to be 2003, what does this mean for mobile users? I assume, due to the higher frequencies used that all new antennae are needed, but at what sort of cost?

Re:um.. Typo?

[umofomia]

From the site:NEW! IEEE 802.16a approved as IEEE standard on 29 January 2002! [emphasis mine]

I do so hope that is a typo.. or this isnt really news...

If you look at the e-mail thread in the other link on the page, you'll see that it is indeed 2003. So it's just a typo on wirelessman.org.

Re:um.. Typo?

[rzrzrz]

typo? no, it is the right date and this is a just in news. Now, you see how fast this 802.16a MAN works.

Re:um.. Typo?

[Cappy Red]

Welcome to Checkuary.

*honk*

Re:um.. Typo?

[Anonymous Coward]

Lousy Smarch weather!

What about Apple's 802 standard

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought Apple was going to go ahead with it's own 802.nnx standard in it's devices(I don't remember which one but it was on /. few days ago) ....

Gosh, makes it hard to decide which technology to buy for home networks. You could be outdated in no time if they decide to discard backward compatibility at some point of time...

Also on /.,

Got milk?

Re:What about Apple's 802 standard

[afidel]

802.nnx are by definition standards (IEEE standards to be exact) and therefore Apple could not come out with their own. Apple is AFAIK going to use 802.11g which occupies the same spectrum as 802.11b (2.4Ghz) but uses a much more advanced and efficient encoding scheme OFDM vs DSSS so it has a max line speed of 54Mbps vs 11Mbps for 802.11b. The encoding is the same used for 802.11a uses in the 5Ghz range so other than needing two antenna and phy systems a lot of the core logic can be shared, that is why most manufacturers are targeting tri-mode 802.11a/b/g devices for the second half of this year. It will allow universal wireless connectivity no matter what the AP is speaking.

Re:What about Apple's 802 standard

[Anonymous Coward]

My god... that was EXACTLY the Charlie Brown teachers talking, wasn't it?

Re:What about Apple's 802 standard

[Tokerat]

Apple no longer "creates" standards, it simply implements them, it may possibly improve apon them if it is possible to give back to the open source community. This means cheaper, more compatable products at Apple quality levels. All off Apple's previous "standards" (Mac video adapter, ADB, etc) where all proprietary to the Macintosh.

• FireWire = Sony iLINK = IEEE 1392
• AirPort = IEEE P802.11's "b" standard
• AirPort Extreme = IEEE P802.11's "g" standard

For more info, IEEE's working group on these standards can be found here.

On another note, this gets me thinking... what are they going to call the 802.16a-based AirPort? AirPort Double Extreme? SpacePort? it aught to be interesting to see what marketing comes up with for this one...

Re:What about Apple's 802 standard

[Oculus Habent]

SpacePort sounds good. Quick! you need to copyright and trademark that name! Maybe Double Plus AirPort. :)

Just a quick note about FireWire. Apple created it, initially for internal drive connections, but realized it would make good external drive connections, and then presented it to IEEE for standardization. They Sony grabbed it and called it i.Link.

That was, though, Apple's biggest creation. Sad, though, that they didn't add FireWire to the original iMac, or products would have been more available for it now.

Ok, I'm offtopic, so I'll go now.

Re:What about Apple's 802 standard

[Salamander]

FireWire is 1394, not 1392.

Re:What about Apple's 802 standard

[Tokerat]

No, actually I give you the +1 Informative, I wasn't aware Apple was the originator of the FireWire project, only that they played a large part in it's development.

Re:What about Apple's 802 standard

[Anonymous Coward]

Personally, I think they should call rendezvous-in-iTunes "SharePort." But that's just me.

Re:What about Apple's 802 standard

[Tokerat]

The big joke with some of my Wintel friends:

What do you call a PowerBook with iChat/Rendezvous and and AirPort card?

Gaydar.

I laughed, even thought I'm a Mac fan, i've seen some of the eccentric yuppies who use Macs. Some of those people just NEED To belong to a cult or else there would be no balance in their lives at all...

Re:What about Apple's 802 standard

[roofingfelt]

what are they going to call the 802.16a-based AirPort? AirPort Double Extreme? SpacePort?

AirPort Royale with Cheese, of course.

Re:What about Apple's 802 standard

[benja]

Apple no longer "creates" standards, it simply implements them, ...

Actually, they do-- in cooperation with the appropriate standards bodies. Apple was/is heavily involved in IETF zeroconf, widely known as Apple's Rendezvous (bringing the ease of AppleTalk to IP networks).

Which is exactly what they ought to do!

... it may possibly improve apon them if it is possible to give back to the open source community.

Right'o.

Re:What about Apple's 802 standard

[Tokerat]

Exactly, they also where responsible for FireWire, etc.

I gues my point wasn't clear: Apple doesnt' design standards to be proprietary for themselved. I.E. "Apple's 802.11 Standard" is the same as everyone else's 802.11 standards. I have my a G4 laptop (my sisters) running thougha LinkSys wireless base station, no problems.

Standards?

[Anonymous Coward]

We DON'T need no stinkin standards!

Re:Standards?

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice try, Bill H G III.

What is the speed?

[ruiner13]

All I can find in that article is them beating to death that it uses a wider frequency band than the existing standards (which is a good thing as the other wireless connectivity standards i feel will saturate the frequency bands quickly). I may have missed it in the artice (and I apologize if i did), but have they released bandwidth figures yet?

Re:What is the speed?

[engineerjeremy]

I believe that the speeds are somewhere around 54 Mbps area, essentially this is bring OFDM ( Orthogonal Frequency Divison Multiplexing) to lower frequencies. This being a frequency hopping. Some companies like alvarion and some others will be able to upgrade there exsisting technology via flash, not 802.11b stuff but most of the 5.8 gear outdoor stuff that is out on the market, or I could be totally wrong!

Re:What is the speed?

[Max Romantschuk]

This PDF indicates data reates between 6-54 Mbps. Apparently 27 might be the goal to start with, if I'm reading the figures right (Halfway on page 2).

Re:What is the speed?

[div_2n]

Since that is such a broad range of frequencies, one of two things will happen --

1) They will form the maximum rate at the lowest possible maximum in that whole spectrum or

2) Make the maximum rate variable over the given frequencies

Personally I hope it is variable because otherwise you are wasting potential bandwidth.

all well and good

[xao gypsie]

this is all well and good, but what i really want to know is if this would give wireless the power to have communities start migrating to that type of connection. and, if not, when is that gonna be, cause that would be pretty slick..

xao

Putting my money where my mouth is...

[wiresquire]

I've got $40 per month that says this never comes to anything ;-)

Sexism out the wazoo

[jonman_d]

wireless MAN standard

How sexist! Haven't they heard about politically correct computing?!?

Re:Sexism out the wazoo

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's Sue em! ;) Imagine if they Had Wired Outside Metro` Area Network. And called it a Wired Woman.
OR wireless even... I think there would be a court case. :D

Re:Sexism out the wazoo

[Anonymous Coward]

I think since it's W-MAN we're ok.

Can anyone find the speed??

[CyberBill]

I saw it said "T1 or greater", so thats 1.5Mbit, and there was some other stuff saying up to 2Mbit. So, if thats all it can handle then that sucks. Sure, greater area is awesome, but we need something extremely fast and extremely directional in a more residential market so we can get a free wireless backbone that can have hot spots on the ends. I see a day where we no longer have ISPs, we are just all connected to each other in a huge mesh.

w00t, man... w00t.

-Bill

Re:Can anyone find the speed??

[fateswarm]

Excellent comment that last one. "all connected to each other in a huge mesh". And the fun part is, most people are convinced that "tree structures" are the only solution for vast networks like the internet, when the truth is a true mesh, not just "I'm connected to you and you are connected to my uncle" but "I'm connected both to you and my uncle" could work really really, nicely and with less downtime. I, too wait for that day.

Re:Can anyone find the speed??

[LS]

The mesh idea is a wonderful concept and something I hope for in the future, but has a number of problems yet to be solved:

* A way to guarantee high quality of service from one side of the globe to another, or even one US state to another.

Who is going to lay down the pipes across the ocean and across the desert? And even if some benevolent souls on the edges of civilization decide to donate long distance pipes, will they be large enough to handle all that multiplexed traffic?

* Manufacturers of Internet equipment and standards committees working together towards this goal.

Decentralization could potentially kill off markets, so what incentive do manufacturers have for designing protocols and building equipment for distributed routing?

* Technological barriers

How would this be implemented? I'm sure there has probably been research done on distributed routing and name lookup services, but will it work at a large scale? And would it be reliable?

* Adoption

With cable, DSL, and wireless, you give someone some money, and all of a sudden you have a connection. With a distributed system, you would need to coordinate with your neighbors, since you can't rely on a company to keep things running. A possible solution would be that companies could be highered to organize and setup a neighborhood network, and then be hands off after that, except for maintanence and upgrades.

Anyway, I hope that the work is done to make this feasible, and that people could be convinced to join a distributed network and get off the "feed".

LS

Re:Can anyone find the speed??

[evilviper]

I see a day where we no longer have ISPs, we are just all connected to each other in a huge mesh.

Gee, doesn't that sound great... So, assuming we eventually have some incredible wireless technology that allows citizens to communicate over the incredibly long hauls required just in the USA, how do you propose other continents communicate with the US? Maybe a group of trained dolphins can carry DVDs back and forth... And you think your delay is bad right now?

Sure, even if there is a few links that can reach from Alaska to Russia, that still means the whole world will be communicating over a handful of slow, low-signal links, which likely go down in bad weather (I'm sure they never have bad weather in Alaska and Siberia...). And those boys down-under are really out of luck, aren't they?

Re:Can anyone find the speed??

[vianetman]

http://www.wbs.nokia.com/solution/index.html

Re:Can anyone find the speed??

[MystikPhish]

what incentive do manufacturers have for designing protocols and building equipment for distributed routing?

NASA is funding research on this kind of mesh computing for the "sensor web" robots for exploration aren't they?

Re:Can anyone find the speed??

[Wesley Felter]

I remember reading that it supports speeds up to 98Mbps full duplex, but that probably depends on what band it's operating in.

Re:Can anyone find the speed??

[apweiler]

Oh please, a little creativity. Sure, it'll be harder to have lots of small, community-run links all meshed together, but you could have some massive ordinary links (satellite, existing underwater fibre etc.; they don't have to be run all by the same corporation, and could even be govt-funded) plus enough small ones to not depend totally on them (whatever the small ones might be - amateur satellites? 'hijacked' abandoned underwater cable? long-range AM radio? trained dolphins? use your imagination...)

Re:Can anyone find the speed??

[evilviper]

I am not saying that Wireless is impossible. The problem is that the parent suggested that we can all have wireless links, and no longer need to pay a company to provide internet access. Lofty goal, but terrible in the real world. Wireless or no wireless, you will be paying someone for your internet access.

Re:Can anyone find the speed??

[apweiler]

That's a different point of course. But what I'm saying is that wireless (or rather, wireless networks interconnected with directional wireless links, ordinary cables, or anything else anyone can come up with) might *become* the internet. Lofty goal, as you say, but thinkable (though probably close to impossible...)

compared to 802.11g

[goombah99]

So all I know is what steve jobs tells me. And jobs said at mac world that the A standard was dead beacuse it was not backward compatible and G was backward compatible with B (and just as speedy as A). Apparently MS and the INtel gang are going with A (e.g. the smart screens use it). So can anyone explain this to me. What is the merit of A over G. Also do A or G do anything to address weak WEP security?

Re:compared to 802.11g

[CyberBill]

802.11a sucks (not really)... it was release first but almost nobody used it since it was much more expensive and not as readily available as 802.11b. So, now that everyone has an 802.11b WAP, they dont wanna switch it all at once, so 802.11g takes its place as well as having more speed (not sure of its exact speed, its not popular enough yet, heh).

So as far as security goes... Its wireless and thus completely insecure. I mean, even 128 bit is insecure, you just need to transfer a crap load of data and have a big bad computer to do the processing. But I am pretty sure they are better than 802.11b, since they have had a year and a half to think it over nice and hard.

Life is not what it seems, but it seems that sometimes life is not what it does not apear to seem as well.
-Bill

Re:compared to 802.11g

[Anonymous Coward]

This isn't 802.11a, this is 802.16a. 802.11 standards are for wireless LANs, 802.16 standards are for wireless MANs. And just in case you don't know, a LAN is a "local area network," and a MAN is a "metro area network."

I doubt Apple will use this standard much, but I imagine your phone company and/or cable company will bitch to high heaven to keep this out of your home.

Re:compared to 802.11g

[Anonymous Coward]

There are two significant differences between 802.11a and 802.11g.

1. Backward compatiblity with 802.11b.

802.11g understands 802.11b, and is capable of sharing the air with it in a cleaner fashion. This theoretically results in fewer collisions, and therefore faster throughput for all involved.
The more useful part of 802.11g understanding 802.11b is that it is very easy (and pretty much standard) to build your 802.11g radio to step down to 802.11b if that's the only thing around. This means that you should be able to use your new 802.11g card with existing wireless layouts.
802.11a does not understand 802.11b -- they mutually consider each other to be interference. This theoretically results in more collisions than 802.11g when used around 802.11b stations.

2. Number of channels. Channels are essentially the sub-bands the radio spectrum gets chopped up into, and traffic on different channels is not supposed to interefere with each other.
802.11g and 802.11b both have very few channels available (3 or 4, depending on who you talk to). The home user doesn't really care, but for someone trying to lay out a grid of receiving radios to provide maximum area coverage, this limitation can be a challenge.
802.11a provides 8 channels (once again, there is some dispute plus or minus one), and hence is preferable when laying out large spreads.

Opinion: 802.11g is a good thing for consumers with small private wireless networks. 802.11a is a good thing for large companies with large networks.

Re:compared to 802.11g

[afidel]

All major manufacturers that I am aware of have a tri-band 802.11a/b/g chip/system in the works. Because 802.11a and 802.11g both use the same encoding scheme a lot of the core logic can be shared between the two, now add backward logic for 802.11b and you have a complete package. You need two phys and two antenna systems (though they will usually use the same antenna substrate for space) and thats about it. As for security that too is in the works, I believe the 802.11x comitee is working on WEP2. Besides there are a variety of solutions on the market that are already secure. For instance Cisco uses dynamic user authentication through RADIUS to dynamically give out keys to each user and the keys change on a user specified interval (make the interval small enough and cracking the keys goes back to cracking a 128bit key, most difficult), this is an oversimplification of the system but enough to get the point across.

Re:compared to 802.11g

[druzicka]

What is the merit of A over G.

802.11a runs in licensed band. So you don't have to worry about your cordless phone, microwave or garage door opener stepping on your wireless LAN.

Also do A or G do anything to address weak WEP security?

802.11i will improve encryption.

Re:compared to 802.11g

[druzicka]

they mutually consider each other to be interference

No, they're on different freqencies, so they don't see each other.

Re:compared to 802.11g

[Anonymous Coward]

"802.11a runs in licensed band."

I love slashdot.

Re:compared to 802.11g

[afidel]

802.11a and 802.11b will never collide or interfere because they are on entirely different chunks of spectrum (2.4Ghz for .11b/g and 5.4Ghz for .11a) so in actuallity if you want the most bandwidth possible place both .11g and .11a and you get 54Mbps*3 channels for 2.4Ghz amd 54Mbps*4 channels for 5.4Ghz, these are for non interfering channels overlapping. In 2D space you can do some neat tiling with falloff levels that allow even more bandwidth than this for a given area.

Re:compared to 802.11g

[afidel]

.11a does not run in a liscensed band, it operates in the 5.4Ghz UNI-III band which is just like the 2.4Ghz UNI-II band in that it is regulated but no liscense in required. 5.4Ghz can potentially have the same problems with portable phones etc that 2.4Ghz has, it's just that right now there are not many devices in this spectrum because of rather high development costs with little payoff.

Re:compared to 802.11g

[Anonymous Coward]

It's clear there are too many standards coming to fast. Many of these are doomed to fail because of this. 802.11b really took off. We need to take a breather and see where it will lead us. Then we can start on new standards.

Re:compared to 802.11g

[Anonymous Coward]

This is partially incorrect.

802.11a and 802.11b don't even operate near each other in terms of spectra. They couldn't interfere with each other if they tried.

N

Define Broadband

[Cyno01]

broadband wireless access in bands ranging from 2GHz to 11GHz.

What do they mean by broadband? High throughput of data, or is this UWB(ulta wideband)and uses a broad range of the RF spectrum?

Re:Define Broadband

[Anonymous Coward]

It's sad to see, but broadband has become a meaningless marketing term. There's no way to go back.

security

[Anonymous Coward]

Does this mean that it is 60% more of a homeland security threat?

Re:security

[Anonymous Coward]

It was 60%, but because it is a really fast standard so it was 120% on the press release.

Re:Traffic Shaping anyone?

[hageshii]

Furthermore, when some fool decides to put his entire hard drive out for grabs on Kazaa, everyone on the network suffers. Our service is subject to frequent bottlenecks and complete downages regularly.

Has your ISP ever heard of traffic shaping? Give top priority to SSH-like stuff, then web-browsing, then ftp, etc. etc. etc., then finally P2P. I run a Gnutella node that constantly uploads at +20KB/sec with no slowdown on web-browsing, etc.

Slashdot editors got duped again !!

[Anonymous Coward]

The guys at IEEE had a bet that this story will be accepted on /. and they succeded.

From the IEEE webpage - "Welcome the birth of the IEEE's first wireless MAN standard for broadband wireless access...",

All IEEE standards shall be updated within five years of the date of
>publication. If the standard is not revised, reaffirmed, or withdrawn
>within five years, the Sponsor will be notified that it will be submitted
>to the Standards Board for administrative withdrawal.

Re:Like Slashdot

[Anonymous Coward]

and the site is formatted as ugly as hell. i am told george dubbya's shit looks more like an informative website than that.

nice idea behind the site, shame it looks like utter crud.

Another junk post - /. editors got duped again !!

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone got CowboyNeal again !!
This story was a joke meant to be posted on /.
Here - http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=52386&cid=5194 415

By the way, Is CowboyNeal from Texas too like CowboyBush ??

The Speed

[Arcticfox24]

According to this site, the speed of "IEEE 801.16.1 is intended to support individual channel data rates of from 2M to 155M bit/sec."

Re:The First Rule Of Fat Club

[Anonymous Coward]

and the second rule is?

Re:First? I don't think so!

[Anonymous Coward]

Well the first network Denial of service will probaly be called VIAGRA.

What about security?

[Anonymous Coward]

After all, we don't want a Wide Open Metro Open Network (WOMAN) screwing everything up for us! ;)

Re:What about security?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you meant Wide Open Metro Area Network (WOMAN)

but then again, I may be wrong, it is almost 1:30am and I should be in bed listening to some good old shortwave..

Cowboy has been distracted since wedding

[Anonymous Coward]

Check this out from same post too:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=52386&cid=5194 319

IEEE 802.16 spec could disrupt wireless landscape

[Anonymous Coward]

What Intel is saying:
IEEE 802.16 spec could disrupt wireless landscape

What the heck?

[phr2]

How are all those bits going to fit in the air? What will the transmitter power requirements be?

I seriously doubt if this is going to use unlicensed spectrum like 802.11. You just can't move that amount of data over that much distance with those little 15 milliwatt(?) transmitters that 802.11 uses. And you can't have thousands of the things active in a city at the same time without clobbering each other.

So expect yet more monopolies given to whichever corporate greedheads have the best political connections, just like in radio and TV broadcasting. Sigh.

Re:What the heck?

[Wesley Felter]

802.16 can run in either licensed or unlicensed spectrum. And there is plenty of spectrum: 802.11a has 8(?) non-overlapping channels which can each carry 54Mbps. IIRC in the ISM and U-NII bands the power limit is much higher than 15mW -- more like 300mW.

some info

[itzdandy]

subscribers send and recieve at speeds of 2Mbit to 155Mbit / second.
bands between 10-66Ghz with mesh topology capabilities, also recently amended for a 2-11Ghz band range as well.

support for QoS in devices, and also support for traffic shaping to improve web browsing experience while higher band protocals are being used.

--

basically, 802.16a is capable of 155Mbit ul/dl speeds in a zone, and use of directional antenea and focused areas allow degree zones to be set up allowing 155MBit/sec in as little as 2degree arc from antenea or better with better equipment. you could conceivably cover a circular area with ~27900MBit/sec agregate bandwidth.

--

please note that this info is from grouper.ieee.org and put into my own unorganized words, please read the docs for more precise info.

Re:some info

[Peartree]

Can you give a specific URL please? I would like to read more.
TIA

Re:First? I don't think so!

[SmittyTheBold]

I'm a man

I'll be the judge of that.

woman?

[Maskirovka]

Just to clear a few things up...
Should our latest acronym WMAN (Wireless Metropolitan Area Network) be pronounced 'woman'? So if someone asks me about my administration experiance, should I brag about how many women I've designed, configured, upgraded, and troubleshot over the years? Sounds like grounds for a certification in network pimping.

Re:woman?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you use FSO for the backhauls you'd have a Wireless/Optical Metropolitan Area Network.

Re:woman?

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude, that's stating the obvious, you know the game.

Re:woman?

[Anonymous Coward]

Err... tongue and check obvious.

I'm confused.

[RadRafe]

Could somebody please explain what this standard does, who will use it, etc., in less technical words, please?

Re:I'm confused.

[papason]

What many folks don't know is that there is a new standard that has finally
been approved for the important 2-11 GHz frequency bands, including licensed
and unlicensed spectrum allocations - 802.16a. Huh? This is a specification
developed under the auspices of the IEEE, the same group that guides the
802.11 standards. 802.11x are standards for Wireless LOCAL Area Networks
(WLAN). 802.16a is that standard for Wireless METRO Area Networks (WMAN or
WirelessMAN).

What is the "problem" with 802.11? The greatest problem is that it was
designed for relatively short distances of about 300 feet in doors (if you
are lucky) and 1,200 feet out of doors. While 802.11 gear can be pushed into
service over longer links, even up to several miles, it was not designed
from the ground up to be used for such distances. It also was not designed
to serve a large number of users. WirelessMAN, on the other hand, was
designed from the "ground up" specifically to tackle the tough requirements
of making wireless broadband work over longer distances and through more
difficult environments, such as heavily wooded areas. With 802.16a systems
can be devised that get around many of the line of sight problems of older
systems. The most important thing about WirelessMAN is the simple fact that
it is a standard that is recognized by the IEEE in conjunction with other
world wide authorization bodies. Along with the standard, a compliance
testing group has been established, similar to 802.11, to make sure that the
basic air interface standards are met between the various equipment
suppliers. With 802.16a there will be core air interface standards
compatibility but individual vendors will go beyond that to offer systems
with added features and capabilities.

What does this mean to users (ergo 'market momentum')? It means that users
will be able to get WBB that operates over entire cities or large geographic
area, such a an entire highway corridor. It will be like WLAN but able to be
used at distances up to several miles. "Great, where can I buy it today?"
How this rolls out into the marketplace is a huge topic of discussion. While
a lot remains to be seen and will be shaped by many complex forces,
including the role of merchant chip suppliers similar to those supplying
parts for WLAN devices, some movement is already under way that will shape
the early going.

Yikes

[LongJohnStewartMill]

Be careful who you're with before blurting this out:

"I just spent the weekend at a MAN Party, and I'm exhausted. I just got my pictures developed. Want to see them? Seriously, you should come next time."

Not that there's anything wrong with that.

where were you...

[Anonymous Coward]

When they were passing out the brains? Didn't you notice the part where he said this ISP is the only game in town? Try reading the ENTIRE comment asswipe.

Re:where were you...

[GoRK]

If they are the only game in town and they suck that much, then it sounds like that he should:

1) Not use them: get a dialup from somewhere -- anywhere -- else if it is possible. A lot of people say "the only game in town" when they mean "the only broadband I can get at my house" The fact remains that he pays for something he doesnt like, then complains to the wrong people. We still don't want to hear it. 2-Way satellite broadband is also available and is not all that bad when there aren't other alternatives. I've used it. It's got to be better than what this guy is describing, unless he wants to play games or something with it.

2) Compete with them: 200 subscribers is nothing. It's enough to afford a T1 even to most any rural area of the US. He could run his own small ISP out of his house or a small office, or he could start a community wireless co-op ISP. Either way, he'd get good service, maybe make a little money on the side, and perhaps put the other guy out of business. Hell yeah, capitalism.

3) Work for them: Get a job over there. He obviously knows some of the things they are doing wrong. Go fix them by getting a job or doing a consulting gig. Even if you don't get a job, you might get on their A list of customers or at least weasel a non-NAT'd ip out of them.

Again, don't fucking gripe to slashdot about it. DO SOMETHING USEFUL.

~GoRK

802.16a MAC presentation

[cedneve]

Here you go:
http://www.ieee802.org/16/docs/01/80216-01_58 r1.pd f

About the speed, they state (page 20) that with a 28Mhz frequency range, you can put up to 132 Mbps of data. Of course, it also depends on the distance from the base station.

Not sure this is what is in their IEEE approved draft but I suppose it hasn't changed.

I'm no expert but I like it. If a manufacturer would quickly get some products out, it would be awesome. We can choose the frequency, the frequency range and provide wireless at speeds way beyond 802.11a/g.

Re:802.16a MAC presentation

[Anonymous Coward]

>>> We can choose the frequency, the frequency range

Excuse me, but what's this "we" stuff? Who is "we"?
Are you the FCC? The NTIA? The WRC? You can't just go plunking yourself down on any old frequency you want willy-nilly, you know.

And, furthermore, as an unlicensed service, you MUST accept interference from, and NOT cause interference TO, the incumbent licensed services.

I'd suggest you wait until 47CFR15 is appropriately amended before you start choosing your frequencies, bub. You also need to learn how to distinguish between the bandwidth and the center frequency involved. I think you meant that the new stuff had a 28MHz bandwidth (and it's "MHz", "M" meaning Mega-, "Hz" named after Heinrich Hertz and therefore capitalized), and not a 28MHz center frequency, which would put it on the 10 meter amateur band, which is likely to invite all kinds of interference problems.

Re:Great, now only... if YOU had a clue

[altek]

"From my perspective, wireless is great! I've loved it since day one. It kicks the crap out of satellite.. I can actually play games now with a decent ping!". ...
"Our service is subject to frequent bottlenecks and complete downages regularly "

Umm... need I say more??? What is wrong with moderators who mod this up to +5 Interesting?? The only thing interesting about it is the double standard and the complete stupidity of this statement.

Go ahead mod me -1 troll I care not. Who said life is fair?! This guy got +5 for these ridiculous comments, I may as well get -5 for pointing it out.

A Good Overview

[-tji]

On the IEEE page there is a good overview document (zipped PDF).

It covers the basics, such as:
Bandwidth: Up to 134Mbps
Hub Radius: A few kilometers
Line of sight propogation

¥ Compared to a Wireless LAN:
--Multimedia QoS, not only contention-based
--Many more users Many more users
--Much higher data rates Much higher data rates
--Much longer Much longer distances

802.16 MAC: Overview
¥ Point-to-Multipoint Point-to-Multipoint
¥ Metropolitan Area Network Metropolitan Area Network
¥ Connection-oriented Connection-oriented
¥ Supports difficult user environments Supports difficult user environments
--High bandwidth, hundreds of users per channel
--Continuous and burst traffic
--Very efficient use of spectrum
¥ Protocol-Independent core (ATM, IP, Ethernet, ) ¥ Balances between stability of Balances between stability of contentionless contentionless and
efficiency of contention-based operation
¥ Flexible QoS offerings Flexible QoS offerings
--CBR, CBR, rt rt-VBR, -VBR, nrt nrt-VBR, BE, with granularity within classes
¥ Supports multiple 802.16

Re:A Good Overview

[leomekenkamp]

--Many more users Many more users
--Much higher data rates Much higher data rates
--Much longer Much longer distances

So I guess it's much so I guess it's much better?

*ducks*

do they mean this?

[twitter]

I got stuck here:

you may not further copy, prepare, and/or distribute copies of this Documen,t or derivative works based on this Document, in any form, without prior written permission from the IEEE.

Does the IEEE really mean that I can't hold onto a copy of their PDF and give it to my friends? While it's great to be able to refrence the site and the latest revisions, it sucks to be at the mercy of the organization and the goodwill of the sponsors to keep the site running. What am I supposed to do, delete my copy until my friend brings his copy back?

Kudos to the members for hashing out the standard. I'm looking forward to more like it.

Re:Tweaking is lame - somewhat OT

[AvantLegion]

Well, it would give some geeks a chance to say that they've hopped on a "woman" without lying through through their teeth....

Although I worry about the definition of a "woman" being simply a "wireless man" - "a man without wires". I don't know what's worse: the implication that, as a man, I'm bound by wires... or the one that, whenever I use my wireless connection, I'm a woman?

I would not use .11a

[lingqi]

Not that 54M / 72M is not cool, but what's up with the 5GHz band? It might be that these guys did not realize there are countries out there that does not have an ISM band at 5GHz?

2.4GHz is about as universal as you can get as far as ISM band is concerned - but you still run into trouble. In the US, say, 2.400-2.465 or somesuch is the ISM band. In Japan it is 2.450-2.900 (or 2.83, I can't remember).

That's not a lot of overlap people! That's exactly why I am staying away from D-Link cards right now - only goes up 2.465GHz, which means that I have to operate out of a 15MHz band when I am in Japan. Considering that 2.400-2.450 is used by the military last I checked, I have no intention of jumping this border.

Similarly, .11a is completely out of question - 5GHz is not even an ISM band in japan, along with a slew of other countries. When they get this mess worked out, I will consider it - but that does not seem to be anytime soon.

Re:I would not use .11a

[fucksl4shd0t]

That's not a lot of overlap people! That's exactly why I am staying away from D-Link cards right now

I'll try not to take my D-link to Japan, I really will.

How long before the study comes out

[Anonymous Coward]

that shows that all of this new wireless stuff causes cancer? (ala cell-phones, high-voltage power lines, etc...)

Boston North End MAN, please.

[Civil_Disobedient]

Would somebody with some technical know-how please, pretty please with Laetitia Casta on top, please set up some kind of broadband wireless for Boston's North End. Right now we got nuthin'!

No DSL (sorry, that fancy fiber cable that replaced your old telephone lines doesn't work with copper-based DSL), no Cable modem (sorry, we here at AT&T are working hard to solve your problems, but have to roll back the date of AT&T Broadband to your area because we've overextended ourselves), and no 802.11b (sorry, no line of sight at all).

It looks like this new standard could be just what this area needs, if someone would just do it. There are tons of people in this area that would subscribe if given the opportunity.

Re:Boston North End MAN, please.

[Anonymous Coward]

We are working on it

Internet Explorer Jism

[Anonymous Coward]

There's nothing quite so dramatic as those IE facials.

Re:First? I don't think so!

[toriver]

Look between your legs - I think you will find a small, short wire there. :-P

Re:First? I don't think so!

[Anonymous Coward]

uhm...wouldn't the proper Denial of Service be called HEADACHE?

Re:Traffic Shaping anyone?

[Oculus Habent]

I think you missed the part where they "don't give a crap" - as long as the money keeps coming in, the less work they do, the better - as far as they are concerned.

802.16a is to 802.11 as VG-AnyLan is to Fast Ether

[rberger]

I have not studied the final 802.16a yet, but from looking at 802.16 about a year ago, I got the impression that 802.16 is to 802.11 as 802.12 VG-AnyLAN was to 802.3 Fast (100Mbps) Ethernet.

802.3 100bT Fast Ethernet and 802.12 VG-AnyLan were considered competitors in 1994 with VG-AnyLan offering "advanced QoS features making it more suitable for Enterprise applications"

The claims even sound similar:

The 802.12 standard for 100 VG-AnyLAN allows for a backbone supporting both the 802.3 frames and the 802.5 frames. This means that an existing enterprise network with both token ring, ethernet, and some central backbone can easily migrate to the 100 VG-AnyLAN environment. This is due to the diverse media architecture this new technology can utilize: Cat. 3,4,&5 four pair UTP, Cat. 2 two pair STP, and single/multimode optical fiber. Meaning that if there is an existing FDDI, token ring, or 10baseT backbone in place all that need be done is simply replace the endpoints (router or HUB blades), connect the 100 VG-AnyLAN repeaters together, and voila a network structure based on a high speed new technology.

Highlights
# Support for those applications demanding a not only high bandwidth, but that are also time sensitive (this is due to the media access method called demand priority)
# Adapt legacy ethernet and tokenring networks to a high speed backbone with great ease because nodes with 100 VG adapters can be configured to transmit either tokenring or ethernet
# Extremely expandable when compared to tokenring, and all forms of ethernet
# Maximum network diameter 8000 meters
# Cascading up to five levels


Here's an obituary from a 100VG AnyLan FAQ

Hi! Welcome to V1.2 of Richard's Unofficial 100VG AnyLan Web FAQ! This substance of this FAQ was last updated on Sunday, January 28, 1997.

January, 2001: At one time, 100VG AnyLan was a very promising technology. However, due to market forces (Fast Ethernet slaughtered it in the market), VG is a dead technology. To my knowledge, there no currently no VG products for sale.

Already there

[Anonymous Coward]

That's the BROADband part

Re:First? I don't think so!

[Anonymous Coward]

dongle, perhaps?

haha! That evolving KaZaA!

[mekkab]

pretty soon KaZaA will start using SSH for its x-fers. This was a big topic for portioning at COMNET this week (at least in the Network Infrastructure seminars, everyone else was ga-ga over wireless and web services.)

OKay, KaZaA doesn't use SSH yet, but its been known to masquerade as/in other protocols... so it takes a little bit more keener insight to find it.

NOW go back to the comment "the ISP doesn't care"
and if they have to put forth effort? Please...

Metropolitan Area?

[FirmWarez]

Geeze, that's gonna take a *big* piece of chalk...

Only 1 question....

[Anonymous Coward]

What is the maximum range this can provide and what speed can be had at that range?

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Have you noticed

[kpayson]

Have you noticed that "I tripple E" rhymes with "802.11b" That's cool! huh huh

What does "802.16a" have going for it?

Re:Tweaking is lame - somewhat OT

[aridhol]

Not without wires - just without the...er..."little cable"

Australia and weather

[Anonymous Coward]

Too bad radio's don't work in snowstorms, or you could use them instead of wireless technology...

Oh wait they do.

Oh, and they ARE wireless technology.

I guess Australia's not out of luck after all. I think each continent can afford a satellite or two to bounce signals off.

As for latency, it's there anyway - Never seen a good Q3A player on an NYC server :)

Re:Australia and weather

[evilviper]

Too bad radio's don't work in snowstorms

Wavelength my dear troll... Wavelenght. The more bandwidth you want, and the further you want the link to travel, the higher you need the frequency of the radiowaves to be. Of course, the down-side is that, the higher the freqency, the less it is able to tolerate even the slightest interference.

I think each continent can afford a satellite or two to bounce signals off.

Besides interference, you clearly have no idea how much it costs to operate a satellite. So, what you would be doing is, instead of paying a small monthly fee for internet access, you would be paying that fee many times over in taxes, so your government can operate the interstate links. Welcome to socialism, where the government runs everything!

In addition, that still wouldn't make wireless any more reliable. For $100, I could build a device that would completely interrupt all 802.11a/g signals in the area. Now wouldn't it be great if companies like ebay, amazon, etc. were relying on Wireless. Anybody with a few bucks can take any section of the internet offline for as long as they like.

As for latency, it's there anyway

The latency you see now is nowhere near what you would get with wireless. Every mile (or less) the signal has to take another hop, wait to be routed. And it has to do that all the way to it's destination. At that point, you would be looking at multi-second delay. Boy the fun we'll all have when you have to wait 15 seconds after you click on a link in a web-page... And that's only if the wireless mesh works perfectly. You're looking at incredibly high packet-losses, and who knows how often the electricity will go out on one of the required APs that you require to route your traffic to it's destination.

Don't get me wrong, I like wireless, but it just can't handle more than a handful of hops (at most) reliably.

D'OH!!!!!

[Tokerat]

Grr, that's what I get for being awake at 8 in the morning. Good catch.

RF Interference?

[Rocket Racket]

2-11 GHz? That's all over the S and X bands!
Anybody remember the story about U.S. destroyers and cruisers visiting a port in Australia and all the garage doors going crazy?

802.16 used OFDM

[earthforce_1]

OFDM (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplex) is more resistant to multipath effects. In conventional spread spectrum, data is pumped rapidly through a single carrier, modulated by a spreading code. With OFDM, the data is modulated and sent across a large number of closely spaced RF carriers at the same time. Sort of like parallel, as opposed to serial transmission. Because the bits are sent in parallel, they can individually be sent at a much slower rate, while still yielding the same overall transmission throughput. Because each bit is "on the air" for a longer period of time, there are less problems with multipath effects.

Seattle Wireless

[bwt]

I see a day where we no longer have ISPs, we are just all connected to each other in a huge mesh.

There are already groups trying to do this in various cities. One of the more advanced ones is in Seattle. Seattle Wireless is a not-for-profit effort to develop a wireless broadband community network in Seattle.

I think the critical factor is as much signal range as it is bandwidth. The Seattle group above is using the 802.11b devices with directional antennas to make their backbone. They've defined classes of nodes in terms of how dedicated the node is to serving just as a backbone. The better the range, the more "connections" happen and the faster the backbone will grow. Looking at their backbone node map shows they are just getting started, but it kind of makes me wish I lived in Seattle.

Re:Traffic Shaping anyone?

[Anonymous Coward]

Has your ISP ever heard of traffic shaping? Give top priority to SSH-like stuff, then web-browsing, then ftp, etc. etc. etc., then finally P2P. I run a Gnutella node that constantly uploads at +20KB/sec with no slowdown on web-browsing, etc.

As someone who usually stuffs my entire connection through port 22, I couldn't agree with you more. Though I think my use of ssh may not be what you had in mind... :)

8 channels are not plenty of spectrum

[phr2]

when you're talking about a city-wide network. Imagine a city phone switch which could only handle 8 conversations at a time. Plenty of spectrum in this situation means tens of thousands of channels.

Re:8 channels are not plenty of spectrum

[Wesley Felter]

My point was that the total throughput available in the U-NII band is around 8*54 = 432Mbps per sector. That sure seems like a lot to me.

Re:8 channels are not plenty of spectrum

[phr2]

Remember that a metro area has a diameter of miles. How many 100 mbit ethernets do you think are operating in the downtown area of any big city? Probably thousands. Don't you think a lot of them will want to extend their reach to the whole metro area? Just think of the big web sites trying to deliver pr0n: who wants to pay $2/GB to some ISP when you can get bandwidth for nothing, at least within that city?

Also, with some gain antennas you should be able to get quite a bit better range than with 802.11, which is already miles. So maybe with some bridges we'll start getting medium and long haul networks bypassing telecoms. I can't see that happening without the transmitters clobbering each other, but even if it was possible, regulators would go nuts.

Calculations...

[idontneedanickname]

Alright, we have:

27900MBit/sec / 8 = 3487.5MBytes/sec

3487.5MBytes/sec / 1024 = 3.405GBytes per second!

*Jaw hits floor* You'd need quite the machine to serve up that kind of data. I don't think the usual "webcafe" owner will have one...

I'll type slowly: 802.11 indoors, 802.16 outdoors

[puzzled]

If you read the MAC layer for 802.11, which can be found in Matthew S Gast's excellent O'Reilly book on 802.11 networks, you'll discover that all 802.11 systems are carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance.

I won't bore you with the details - just trust me - when your media access depends on station cooperation, its not something you want running in the great outdoors where you have two stations on the same cell separated by four air miles and lots of tall buildings. Throughput suckage will ensue shortly if you don't know what you're doing with a system like that, and its inevitable under load even if you're a guru.

The 802.16 family of standards specifies a MAC layer that is meant to provide wireless access, not wireless lan service. I haven't read that one in detail yet, since it would only make me fear & loathe my 802.11b stuff, but its almost certainly got some sort of polling scheme along the lines of good ol' Arcnet, rather than the ethernet like CSMA/CA in 802.11.

We've had a generation of wireless ISPs cobbling 802.11b with a few running Alvarion's fine Breeze Access II product, now with 802.16 coming on strong we'll see *every* WISP of any size running that kind of gear.

I'd write more, but I'm slobbering on some lit I got from http://www.apertonet.com

Thx

[RadRafe]

You've made the issue clear as a bell, Papason. Many thanks.

barbikeen@msn.com

[Anonymous Coward]

barbikeen@msn.com

Re:I'll type slowly: 802.11 indoors, 802.16 outdoo

[nsayer]

Just a bit of amplification for those not familiar with wireless systems.

Ethernet is CSMA/CD - Carrier Sense, Multiple Access with Collision Detection. Carrier Sense simply means you can hear anyone else on channel when they talk. Multiple Access means that anyone can talk any time they want. Collision Detection means that if two people happen to talk at the same time, they can actually detect that they have done so, back off and try again. Ethernet can do CSMA/CD because, to oversimplify, it can listen at the same time as it transmits, therefore it can hear the collisions.

CSMA/CA systems, by contrast, are the same as far as the CSMA part goes, but CA stands for Collision Avoidance. This is really just spin. It means that the station's cannot listen at the same time as they transmit. This is typical for peer-to-peer wireless systems. It's like CB radio. When you push the push-to-talk button, the receiver stops receiving. You need this to happen, because the transmitter is relatively powerful and the receiver is relatively sensitive. Even if the receiver would not be damaged by having the transmitter key up right next to it, the transmitter would easily drown out the signal from any other on-channel transmitter.

"But wait," I hear you cry, "What about cell phones? They can transmit and receive at the same time." This is true. But in this case, the transmitter and receiver are not on the same frequency, but instead on frequencies very far apart. This allows the receiver to have a band-reject filter tuned for the transmitter's output. In fact, the closer in frequency a full-duplex (receive and transmit simultaneously on independent channels) receiver and transmitter are, the more elaborate the filtering must be. Extreme examples can be had by looking at a typical Amateur Radio 3 kHz FM voice in-band VHF repeater. The frequency separation between receiver and transmitter on the 2 meter band is typically 600 kHz. To achieve sufficient isolation, you actually need to use tuned cavities. They're rather large and ticklish to get dialed in. But although the repeater can use the cavities to achieve full-duplex, the user radios are still half-duplex (transmit and receive on independent channels, but not at the same time). Which means that the only way you know that you and your fellow repeater user keyed up at the same time is when the other repeater users tell you that they didn't hear you.

Full- or half-duplex is only an attractive solution in cases where either it's not a peer-to-peer system or where it's a point-to-point system. So it's a lot like 10baseT, where you can either wire two peers directly together or you can connect multiple stations to a repeater (aka a hub or a switch). 802.11b radios are simplex (they transmit and receive on the same channel). This means that you're not going to be able to do collision detection. And that means that either throughput will suffer much more heavily than CSMA/CD systems when demand rises, or you need to have a much more asymetric model, probably with the server station polling the clients, or you need some sort of variation on token rings or some other dining-philosopher-like solution.

One thing they could have done would be to make 802.11b infrastructure mode a half-duplex mode. On the plus side, this means that the downlink from the base station would be collision free since user stations (at least those on the same network) would not be expected. On the minus side, this means, of course, that all of the base stations would take two channels.

Strong enough for a MAN...

[Galaphine]

...but made for a WOMAN. (Ok, it sounded better when it was inside my head...)

Re:Traffic Shaping anyone?

[AndyMcL]

If you want to stop someone from hiding apps on ports that are usually let through (80, 22, etc.) and traffic shape (QoS) then just use a Sitara box http://www.sitaranetworks.com .

It can do up to layer 7 (application layer) classification and monitoring/reporting.

and no, I do not work for Sitara. I have done product testing with them, Packeteer and Cisco and Sitara came out on top. ...if only I could get one for home.....

Andy