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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."
No, here it is: http://www.commsdesign.com/story/OEG20030130S0055 Maybe I'll click HTML instead of Plain old text next time.
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.
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.
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."
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.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
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.
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.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
What Intel is saying:
IEEE 802.16 spec could disrupt wireless landscape
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.
If Happy Fun Ball begins to smoke, get away immediately. Seek shelter and cover head.
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.
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).
.: Max Romantschuk
Here you go:8 r1.pd f
http://www.ieee802.org/16/docs/01/80216-01_5
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.
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
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?
.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.
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,
My life in the land of the rising sun.
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...
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
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.
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit