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Intel Pushes 802.16a Wireless MAN Standard
An anonymous reader writes "The 802.16a standard, approved in January of this year, is a wireless metropolitan area network technology that will connect 802.11 hot spots to the Internet and provide a wireless extension to cable and DSL for last mile broadband access. It provides up to 50-kilometers of range and allows users to get broadband connectivity without needing a direct line of sight with the base station. The wireless broadband technology also provides shared data rates up to 70-Mbit/s."
Martin Cooper, the inventor of the cell phone had this in a recent interview http://news.com.com/2008-1082-995667.html
"Wi-Fi is wonderful. It is a superb local area network--what it was designed to do--and it does that very well. When you try to make Wi-Fi cover a wide area, it's absolutely the worst way to do it. Think about it. In order to cover a city, you need a million sites; we actually did an analysis of that. And every one of them has got to have backhaul. So it turns out it's neither economical nor practical."
I realise this is WiMax but I wonder what they are doing to move beyond the limitations these guys found.
Hey I never got much of a chance to read up on this but with the advertised range what is the security like? Dont tell me its like that pushover excuse for protection known as WEP on 802.11b. My big concern is that with all this range it will be hard to pinpoint where the guy with a card and a laptop is tryign to get your stuff. Or steal connection from an ISP? Anyone got any thoughts or know the security specifics?
Everyday You see me is the worst day of my life -Office Space
LAN = Local Area Network
WAN = Wide Area Network
MAN = Metropoliton Area Network
WOMAN = Wide Open Metropolitan Area Network, which is what most of those 802.11 networks will be...
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Dietary fiber is like asynchronous IO-- Non-blocking!
You reckon those (possibly overabundant and overfunded) WiFi startups are in on this?
It would be par for the course for a newer technology to lay waste to grand entrepeneurial visions... but since this standard was approved in January, hopefully some of those startups have it 802.16a in their sights.
They had better make a standard for the naming of all these standards, or else my head is going to start spinning.
I don't think I want to share 70-Mbit/s with everyone using the service within a 50 kilometer range.
Maybe you should educate the morons of tomorrow so they'll stop believing the leaders of tomorrow. - Dogbert
It won't be compatible with A/B/G, 16a is a backhaul standard, and you (probably) won't ever have to talk to a 16a radio with your laptop.
The idea is to use this to supply bandwidth to hotspots.
It's 802.16a. All of the three technologies you listed are just for short range networks, not the kind of MAN network that they are addressing with 802.16a.
I think the way it would work is you'd get an 802.16a "modem", just like you get a cable or DSL box right now to connect your network to.
Personally, I find wireless access a choice of last resort - if I can get cable or DSL I'd take that every time over wireless.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
How does 802.16a hope to achieve these lofty goals?
What band does it use? Considering its long distance, the 802.11a 5Ghz range seems a bit out of the question, just too energy hungry. If its 2.4, i cant see how they expect it to compete with every other signal under the sun and still pull off such spectactamundo specs.
Typical transmition power?
Now wouldnt it be nice to have a frequency not in tune with water? So maybe vegitation isnt a big iron curtain between you and your data? Bring that critical LoS step another twenty feet down to earth? Course, thats probably not gonna happen.
If a Pringles can is able to extend the range of 802.11 wireless LAN to several km, then a similar application of tubular snack food waveguide technology to this new standard ought to solve the question of "are we alone in the universe" once and for all!
In Soviet Rush, today's Tom Sawyer gets high on you.
...the CDMA carriers (SprintPCS and Verizon) will have 2Mbps 1xEVDO (TRUE 3G networks) up and active. The biggest single limiting factor to creating a wireless infrastructure is that somewhere it has to tie into fibre optics. Wireless carriers, nacent though the technology is today, have this figured out. Some xx,000 wireless radio towers all terminate at a base station connected to real telco networks.
Creating new wireless networks for purposes of roaming inside a metropolitan area seems like a big waste of resources -- especially considering that wireless carriers have already figured this out.
The surest sign of intelligent life in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us. -- Calvin & Hobbes
I wonder if this will be cheap enough to use with community wirless networks, or if we'll be stuck trying to extend the range of 802.11b? I would hate to see the wireless spectrum sold to the highest bidder the way domains were, but it seems that this may in fact happen unless laws are created to protect non-profit community access networks.
We have one such group here in Atlanta called atlantafreenet.org
The project looks fairly promising, and they already have a backbone up, but it requires a line of site. Does anyone have any prices on this equipment? I would hate to see the price of this technology made artificially high or have the bandwidth used up by the highest bidder. Hopefully we'll see communities creating their own free networks out of this.
On one side the marketing at Intel is pushing for 802.11a, and on the other side, the company offers technology with 802.11b only. What you can get from Intel as far as Wi-Fi in the new line of x86 laptops is an inferior 802.11b. Intel 802.11b chipset is significantly worse than other players like broadcom that even reviewers of ZDNet flag the chip has been mediocre.
And currently, if I want to get a laptop with 802.11a or both 802.11a/b (which makes more sense currently since a is not so popular), I can not buy anything with Intel Mini-PCI chipset in it (Centrino technology, not the banias but the wireless stuff, is 802.11b only).
The new laptops with 802.11a/b all come with the superior Broadcom chip that has been licensed to Philips, IBM, Dell, etc...
It appears that Intel marketing droids are at work on some cool idea, and the engineers are developing something else. Not too uncommon for a company of this size.
You wanna share 2Mbps,( and pay through your nose), or you wanna share 11Mbps (.11b), 54Mbps(.11a,g) ??
Especially if this is a fixed application, and doesn't need to be truly mobile?
All bow to his Noodliness!! His Noodle Appendage has touched me!
Totally different standards. And for a typical long-haul connection both endpoints are staticly configured, so the security protocols like WEP and AES aren't needed at the layer2/1 level. Instead, each endpoint should just run a vpn. Still vulnerable to denial of service due to spoofing, but it's wireless - that's unavoidable. The key is to make it unlikely by limiting its usefulness, and with a vpn running, an attacker can only deny service, never gain free service or snoop the medium for anything useful.
Plug em in
Wires are the future
When all you wireless guys cancer ridden corpses are long since buried, those of us with wires will be enjoying the fruits of the new millenium.
Ever try to assasinate someone with piano 'air'? No. You need wire.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Something doesn't add up to me. You can already go up to 72mi/115.8km with 802.11b in the 2.4 range. I know you don't get that high of data transfer that way but you can get really good transfers easily up to 24mi/38.6km and higher.
The only good I see coming from this will be more non-overlapping channels. But I noticed that some of the frequencies they are talking about are in the licensed bands. I really don't see how they are going to make that affordable unless the FCC opens up some frequencies.
It seems to me that cost effective deployment of such technology might be a good ways away unless I am missing something. If I am, please someone clear things up for me.
When I thought about this for a second...
It seems to me that this is the backend for the 802.11b and/or 802.11g wireless hotspots. Try this scenario..
Say I own a lot of starbucks (if they allow franchising, but this is an example so it doesn't matter).
I have a big fat oc3 sitting in downtown LA ready to serve bandwith to a lot of starbucks in LA. It would be MUCH more economical to pay for just one oc3 rather then a bunch of t1's or even cable modems for EACH starbucks. Using this technology, you pay once for the hardware and can send the bandwith from your oc3 over to each and every starbucks you want to and siphon it through the 802.11x clients without having to have the cable/phone companies come in and install land lines in each location.
Also, say that it was decided that you needed more bandwith for your coffee shops. Welp, you just add more bandwith at the home site (assuming each starbucks doesn't NEED 70mbits or whatever the new standard allows), and you now have more bandwith for all your starbucks shops...i think it's a great idea and is extremely expandable.
-gabe
802.11[b,a,g] is WiFi, this is 802.16a. (Note 802.3 is Ethernet, but this isn't Ethernet either). Granted, there's a provision in the spec for linking 802.11 WAN's, but the much more interesting part of the spec is the MAN stuff, with 20km links. The IEEE usually gets these things right, so I wouldn't worry about Mr. Cooper's concerns.
I need this - the only low-latency broadband I can get at my house (in a lovely pastoral setting 7.2 miles from the CO my line is served from, but of course not the closest) runs $850 install plus $90/mo. SWMBO frowns upon such things, so let's hear it for standards!. Remember what Proxim radios cost before 802.11b?
I'm actually more concerned about press articles that were flying around today talking about how Intel was about to revolutionize wireless communications. Yay, they sponsored an industry group already promoting an IEEE spec, but it seems more of a case of "why actually do the work when you can just take credit for it?"
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
From grouper.ieee.org/groups/802/16/pub/buzz.html
Now thats just silly. Correct arithmetic does not make correct conclusion. Oh wait, I just checked in preview, your arithmetic is wrong. PI*r*r... 3.141596*50*50 = 7853sqkm... ~9kbps/sqkm. Maybe you used PI*PI*r*r? Anyway, to continue...
Just like cellular phone cell size, you tailor the coverage area to match the number of subscribers. In an urban area you use small cells, as small as a block or 4, in rural areas crank it up and cover a whole county. (I'm from Missouri, ours fit. Nevadans and Austrailians not so.)
Of course, most deployments will use much smaller (1-5 mile radius) cells. Also keep in mind that the cells are sectored.
Yes, except you won't know where to find it, and the equipment will always fake a link light, so even if you think you've found it, you can't be sure.
Don't forget that they also tend to be highly unstable, suffer from monthly outages, and require enough regular maintenance that you'll likely have less time to spend fragging with the guys.
Watch out for the frequently required diamond upgrade too!
Blockwars: a real-time multiplayer game similar to Tetris.
"They do not preach that their god will rouse them, a little before the Nuts work loose." Kipling, 'The Sons of Martha'
TV is moving off of the VHF band as the eventual HDTV revolution takes place. But what's stopping Acme Wireless from saying, "Hey, only channels 4,6, and 10 are being used in this area. Why don't we add some sort of auto-sensing feature to broadband wireless equiptment and start using parts of VHF today..." and then asking the FCC for help? Then, when the machinery starts hopping packets to other routers that are close to other television markets, it switches to another unused set of frequencies.
I'm just thinking of a solution like that little channel button on 2.4ghz wireless phones.
Technically infeasable?
If it worked, it'd be a hella way to jumpstart nationwide wireless Internet via the VHF band now and not a decade or two from now.
Thoughts?
I attended a talk today by Roger B. Marks, a member of the IEEE 802.16 standards committee where he described the standard in detail. Many people say just add a pringles can to 802.11 to extend the range, but there are many other issues beyond range. 802.11 and 802.16 are designed for different purposes.
Among other things, Mr. Marks described that 802.11's MAC uses CSMA/CA (carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance). The carrier sense means that it listens (or tries to listen) for other devices broadcasting and only sends when it detects silence since the receiver can only handle one transmission at a time. This is fine for wireless LAN's where for the most part, all of the devices can "hear" each others transmissions and figure out when its ok to send. In an 802.16 MAN (metropolitan area network), the users' devices can't receive each others transmissions so the base station assigns each device a time slot in which to send & receive its data. (For more information on IEEE802.16, see their website: http://WirelessMAN.org.)
Even old 802.11 standard can reach 50km. There is no limitation of distance in the actual protocol. With high gain antenna, line of sight and enough power you can shoot much more. Actually there was a trial in Sweden using metorolagical baloons and they did more than 200km with 802.11b. The main concern is LOS blocking due to curvature of the Earth. If you want to shoot 60km and have one antenna at ground level, you need to have the other one at least 200m high. And this will aplly to 802.16 too.
http://ebgp.net/ccc/