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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."

12 of 188 comments (clear)

  1. Why must MAN always come before WOMAN? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    When will that wireless WOMAN standard come out?

  2. Great, now only if my ISP cared. by Kethinov · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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. :(

    --
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  3. Re:Another 802.16 Article by Strike · · Score: 5, Informative

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

  4. Comment removed by account_deleted · · Score: 5, Funny

    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  5. Can anyone find the speed?? by CyberBill · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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

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    -Bill
  6. Re:Traffic Shaping anyone? by hageshii · · Score: 5, Interesting
    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.
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    .sig: No such file or directory
  7. Re:compared to 802.11g by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  8. The Speed by Arcticfox24 · · Score: 5, Informative

    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."

  9. Re:What about Apple's 802 standard by afidel · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

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    There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
  10. Re:compared to 802.11g by afidel · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.
  11. woman? by Maskirovka · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

  12. Already there by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    That's the BROADband part