Slashdot Mirror
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."
When will that wireless WOMAN standard come out?
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.
You're right, I wouldn't steal a car. But if it were possible, I sure as hell would download one!
No, here it is: http://www.commsdesign.com/story/OEG20030130S0055 Maybe I'll click HTML instead of Plain old text next time.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
... gets two-hundred bucks, and moves onto 802.16b ...
Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate. Ex-O'Reilly/MIT employee, now a full-time Google employee.
wireless MAN standard
How sexist! Haven't they heard about politically correct computing?!?
--
http://nemilar.net - Not your grandmother's soup kitchen
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
-Bill
.sig: No such file or directory
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.
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.
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.
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
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
So that's one small step for MAN... ?
That's the BROADband part