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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."
Right on the heels of this article, I'm more worried about War Cooking... gangs of nerdish thugs driving around cities, looking for open access to my microwave.
07:10 AM Cook for 10 minutes
07:20 AM Done
07:22 AM Cook for 15 minutes
07:37 AM Done
07:48 AM Cook for 5 minutes
07:53 AM Done
08:04 AM Cook for 3 minutes
08:07 AM Done
08:14 AM Cook for 25 minutes
Smoke alarm goes off, firemen arrive, haul smoking carcass of microwave out into street.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
...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
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.
"WOMAN = Wide Open Metropolitan Area Network, which is what most of those 802.11 networks will be..."
Presumably these will be equipped with an 802.11g-spot?
Beauty is in the eye of the beerholder.
To clarify,
And every one of them has got to have backhaul
WiMAX isn't expected to be what you use to hit the 'hotspots' with your notebook. It is expected to feed the hotspots... it *is* the backhaul. Naturally it must have it's own, land-based backhaul, but that's no sweat for guys who'll be rolling this out.
The idea of 'free' zones will largely pass when the people with the money to make wireless internet work finally get the tech and the business model worked out. Yes, I said *business*. Sure, there will be people, organizations and towns who'll foot the bill for small hotspots, but to make it work, to make it ubiquitous such that you *expect* it to work, will be require a commercial model. 802.16a is the first major technological step toward this model's feasibility.
Presumably these will be equipped with an 802.11g-spot?
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.