How Much is Riding on Wi-Fi?

nexex writes "The Seattle Post-Intelligencer's John Cook explores the current flood of money on wireless networking startups and if they could be heading towards another dotcom bubble. Interesting tidbits include, ;More than 60 Wi-Fi start-ups have raised more than $650 million in the past two years, according to VentureWire. Last quarter, there was more money invested into wireless technologies than networking and enterprise software.'" The article's got some good commentary on grassroots-founded tech trends vs. investment-backed tech trends, and tries to explain why wi-fi has caught on so well.

Comments

Centrino

[Perdo]

Welcome to Intel, where if your laptop has a pentuim-M, an intel chipset and an Intel 802.11b card, you can call your laptop a Centrino. Oh, don't tell anyone that Apple has had the same functionality for three years, otherwise people would know we are not doing anything new, which we are!

For instance the new Pentium-M is an all new from the ground up processor that at 1.6 Ghz, outperforms the Pentium 4 at 2.8 Ghz. The Pentuim 4 is still faster than the Athlon though, becuase it has a higher clockspeed. Oh, and the Pentium-M is a Pentium III using a Pentium 4 bus and 1 mb of L2 Cache.

So, the Centrino is all new, using three year old technology pioneered by Apple and using a 4 year old processor that still manages to work over our all new Pentium 4.

At least the chipset is still good, just like Extreme(ly bad) graphics, Granite Bay with support for 8x AGP^H^H^H^H^H 4x AGP and the great i820 with a super reliable memory translator hub.

Umm....

OK! we have hotspots all over the world to use your brand new laptop with! Why, in China, an emerging market that we have invested billions in, there are 6 hotspots already! One for every 200,000,000 people...

OK, nevermind.. Centrino is just a PR campaign to sell the same warmed over crap we have been pushing for the last 5 years. Now shut up and buy it, were almost a monopoly again and we are not going to take your consumer crap when we have the market in a strangle hold again.

It will be just like the good old days when you all forked over $2000 for our latest steaming silicon turd.

Re:Centrino

[jo_ham]

Wordy McWord.

I have been laughing at those Intel Centrino adverts with the desks in the middle of empty stadiums and in the middle of fields full of cows.

Even if they do get 802.11 to connect at that range, that speace heater CPU will eat your battery for breakfast, and burn your penis as a bonus.

I'll just sit here with my iBook, which did what this Centrino bollocks does, but 3 years ago, and with a 5 hour battery life.

Intel Inside: the world's most commonly used warning sticker

Re:If so much is riding on it...

[BuckaBooBob]

God in the thread I See 2 very common big problems with what people are talking about... getting packet loss so what do they do.. make an assumption that the singal level is too low so they boot the level with new antennas withdoing doing research and proper troubleshooting to find the actual cause (which could possibly be signal strength but doubtful from the close proximity described).

I see far too much of this style of troubleshooting in the computer related sector. People making diagnosis based on speculation rather than a understanding the problem. Then when thier problem still exsists after a random remedy for the perceived problem has been implimented they blame the technology for its suposed shortcommings.

Was the singal strength actually too low? Was the Carrier to Noise Ratio too high? Excessive Packet collisions causeing the loss? Could have some of the loss come from the wierd portion of the network? Could part of the problem be with the wireless hardware itself( if you stand right ontop of the AP do you still get significant loss)? These are your basic components to start looking at to properly troubleshoot Wi-Fi problems. Once you know one of these basic contributing factors then there is much more exploration of the problem may be needed to be done to find the root cause of the problem so it can be properly rectified or the decision can be made that Wi-Fi is not an acceptable technology to use in your instance/application(which this last one is by far the most overlooked).

But these simple basic things are really what set people in the IT sector apart. There are far too many people that utilize the "Pin the tail on the Donkey"/"Processes of Elimination" troubleshooting methods instead of logical deductive reasoning.