Wireless at Firewire Speeds?

MeCoward writes "EETimes reporting on working group that hopes to leapfrog 802.11 to create wireless 1394 links. Initially 100mbps but aiming for 400mbps." I don't expect to see this anytime soon, but it certainly makes things like wireless HDTV feasible. Sure would be cool. Of course Bluetooth is only now just catching on, so imagine how long it'll be before this becomes practical.

Comments

wireless HDTV?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't expect to see this anytime soon, but it certainly makes things like wireless HDTV feasible.

Uh... maybe I'm just a dumbass or something, but wireless HDTV is already feasible. I watch it every day. It's called 8VSB.

However you encode it, broadcast HDTV is only 19.3 Mbps. It's feasible over dual-like 802.11a, or 802.11g.

Firewireless

[Revvy]

Firewireless has been around a while. It even has DRM.

I don't expect to see this anytime soon...
Why would you? We've only been waiting several years already.

So much for being an 'early adopter'.

Too much layering here

[Animats]

Another layer underneath FireWire? Why?

FireWire as an electrical interconnect is good. FireWire as a protocol sucks.

Down at the bottom, FireWire is a LAN. You send packets with a source address and a destination address. It's a TDMA LAN, more like token ring than Ethernet, with assigned time slots.

Video is sent as broadcast packets, on a rigid schedule, with no ACKs. That's quite straightforward.

The ugly part is the layer which implements load/store emulation for 32-bit data items in a 64-bit address space. This was designed by people who think in terms of "device registers". Control functions are exercised by stores and loads from "device registers". Typically, these "registers" have no physical existence at either end; one end has a CPU issuing commands and the other end receives commands and executes switch statements. Register definitions are supposed to be standardized; in practice, the standards are more ambiguous than they should be. This results in FireWire devices coming with unnecessary "drivers". A command/response protocol like SCSI would have been far better. With the current system, generic drivers are hard.

There's already Ethernet on top of FireWire, SCSI on top of FireWire, and raw IP on top of FireWire. This is too much layering of pure packet protocols.

Re:Health concerns

[Jimmy_B]

One of the basic consequences of Shannon's Law, a fundamental tenet of information theory, that in order to increase your bandwidth and transmission rate, with a given noise level (which we can't reduce beyond a certain point, due to inherent cosmic background noise, not to mention many other manmade factors), you have to increase your transmission power to compensate.

No, it doesn't; in fact, it says that there is a maximum possible bandwidth for a given power and noise level, which current technologies are far short of. Therefore, it is possible to increase bandwidth without increasing power, to a point. I might also add that the FCC limits transmission power on all parts of the spectrum.

With all this RF energy floating about amidst space, I am sort of concerned that if ultra high-speed wireless becomes ubiquitous, without the right studies being done, this may cause negative impact to health. While I am not a physician or molecular biologist, I think that we need to investigate this before jumping too quickly.

I recall an article from Skeptical Inquirer awhile back which investigated the claims of some who claimed to suffer from 'electrosensitivity'. The finding was that a visible non-transmitting antenna or wire would produce the supposed symptoms, while a concealed active one had no measurable effect; therefore, the supposed symptoms were entirely psychological. In light of the number of crackpots claiming that EM radiation affects them, and the thoroughness with which they have been debunked, I don't think it necessary to do any further research.

A couple of facts

[bryan1945]

I am a member of the IEEE Standards Association, and I've spent the last month writing a paper on WLANs.

1)802.15.3 IS Ultra WideBand.
2)The FCC has basically crippled the original version of this tech.
3)Cellular providers & GPS want their freqs eliminated from this (UWB goes from 3-10 GHz)
4)The original spec only went to 100 Mbps, and there is no official working group trying to expand this.
5)The outermost range is 10 meters, while 802.11 can max out at 100 meters. Great leapfrog action!
6)Only 4 companies can currently produce UWB devices- 3 for imaging systems and 1 for some kind of "toilet device". (seriously! but I couldn't find any more enough about this toilet thing)
7)Thomson's 802.11a & HiperLan product has nothing to do with UWB, yet they quote 802.15.3 (see #1)
8)TOTAL HORSESHIT STORY

Happy day!