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

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: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.

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.

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?

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: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.