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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.
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.
but it certainly makes things like wireless HDTV feasible
:P
Because right now you can't pick up HDTV from over-the-air signals... right????
If 802.11g didn't make you want to stick your head in front of a Cantenna to get a preview of brain tumors to come, this new standard certainly will.
UWB only works if you severly limit the range (10m in the case of 802.15.3 networks). This might be fine for connecting you DVR to your TV, but it won't be usefull for connecting your DVR to the tv on the other side of the house or up a floor. This could be ultra cool for next generation MIDI though, the ability to connect all of your devices wirelessly and get both MIDI data and samples would rock. I can't imagine how much this would please all of the musicians who have had to do a road show with the spagheti nest that is MIDI setups.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Heberling is also working with the 802.15.3a committee attempting to set standards for an ultrawideband physical layer chip that could transmit at data rates of 100 Mbits/second initially but be upgraded to versions at 200 and 400 Mbits/s, albeit at ranges of 10 meters or less.
So... I can have a massive bandwidth without any cabling - as long as I don't move the devices further apart than a cable can reach. Somehow, while fiddling with cables can be a hazzle now and then, I think I'll stick to cables. One reason for this is security - unless this technology relies on LOS (line Of Sight), which would make it even less an atractive replacement for cabling, people would likely be able to pick up the signals from a much further distance than the aforementioned ten meters...
...unless I decide to utilise some of that bandwidth - along with CPU-time - to encrypt my signal... which I wouldn't have that much reason to do with a piece of cabel in the first place.
Still, early days and all that - we'll see just where and how this ends up in a few years time.
Everything in the world is controlled by a small, evil group to which, unfortunately, no one you know belongs.
Anyway, this seems to be the next step up from Bluetooth (which is more of a wireless replacement of USB) for connecting wireless DVD players to a projector or TV, or play media files from a wireless 1394 hard drive or a computer sitting in your AV rack.
To think, wireless HDTV! That would be like - like getting HDTV over the air! You would just need an antenna, maybe a fancy converter box. Who could think it possible? Wouldn't it be cool if they could do multiple channels at the same time? *sigh* Jeff
"Bluetooth is only now just catching on, so imagine how long it'll be before this becomes practical. "
Bluetooth is slow. If it was 100 time faster, it would catch on faster, becuase there would be more applications for it. With less-than-megabit speeds, the only thing you would EVER want to do is serial I/O (sync stuff, keyboards), and *maybe* a mono audio stream.
The consumer electronics industry has been eyeballing FireWire (1394) for a while. It makes for one hell of an universal interconnect between all your digital devices, rather than having coax spaghetti and 20 IR or IF devices all over the place. Instead you have one FireWire hub, going to your receiver, your DVD player, your VCR, your CD changer, and your HDTV decoder, and one remote that tells one device what to tell the others...
That's my kind of home automation and control.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Will this new wireless firewire standard still suffer from the same driver patent issues that surround current firewire implementations? I can only assume so if it's based off the same basic technology. It would be nice if they (IEEE) would clean up their act in regards to royalty-based patents finding their way into standards. IMHO, of course.
-A.M.
Pimpin' all the Karma Hoes!
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'.
Wow, if they had wireless HDTV, they could put that in the UHF spectrum and free up the VHF spectrum for other uses!
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.
While firewire has many advantages over USB, I think it's safe to say that after the Ipod got usb 2, firewire is not really doing very well:
Firewire advantages:
* can connect devices directly to each other (no host needed) - possibly with USB on the go
* More power available to devices - true, but most devices don't need all that power.
* faster transfer - this is mostly due to the fact that more of the protocol is done in the chipset, less cpu work, as cpu's get faster this problem will diminish, and most devices don't use all that bandwidth anyway
USB 1/2
* much cheaper to manufacture
* tons of devices - except video cameras, however I believe cameras will switch from dv to hd, and when and if that happens, usb will be used.
* simpler protocol
* much greater support - OpenBSD supports it (extremely important)
Also the completely lunatic idea to have a different port for fw800, is to me unbelievable!
Does it really seem healthy to be constantly bombarded with gigabits of data?
Any tinfoil hat people out there that do tailoring? -n
http://www.remix.net/
If you were to look at all the RF sources going through the air at any one time, including radio/tv station towers and all of the wide-spectrum junk from that massive nuclear explosion that keeps us warm 93 million miles away, then you should already be paranoid.
Unlicensed transmission devices are already limited to 100mW ERP transmit power. Most modern cell phones are under 600mW maximum IIRC. We probably would have seen much worse already had this been a major problem. What about cordless phones? What about the CRTs, even the low-radiation kind? Those make me more nervous than a simple radio device because we are more frequently and directly exposed to their radiation than a transmitter on a device connected to electronic equipment.
A few years ago, the IEEE Spectrum had an article that addressed the problems of RF from sources like power lines. One of the most interesting conclusions: the radiation along the center axis through an earphone was actually a significant source of radiation to the brain. Does that mean we ban earphones?
Sure, we need to do studies, but I'm suspecting that we won't have to wear tin foil on our heads any time soon, if for no other reason than that we should've already been wearing them a long time ago.
I was worried I would have to wait years for WiFi and cell phones to give me brain cancer.
This should move up my timetable considerably AND increase the number of locations in my home I can place the HDTV that I cannot yet afford. Bonus!
Back in high school I did some student co-op work at Sandia National Labs in Albuquerque. They had (among other cool things) a giant concrete tower used for solar collection testing. A wide array of mirrors on the ground focused sunlight up to the top of the tower, heating the salty water circulating inside.
The cool thing was the actual spot where all the mirrors focused. It glowed, shimmered, and attracted small birds. As the birds flew into the beam... !POOF! A few stray, charred feathers were all that remained.
As the power of all these wireless and cellular technologies increases, I feel more and more like that bird. I can't resist the draw of these bright, shiny objects, but one of these days I'm going to step between two 802.something access points and get zapped into ash.
Well, it's based on Firewire, but there's no wire... It travels through the air with no wire, kinda like a bird.
I've got it, let's call it "FireBird"... I can't forsee any problems with using that name, and I've done months of research...
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Ever heard of 802.16? Seriously, the microwave folks have been doing point to point wireless to project mad bandwidth across serious distances for a LONG time.
http://tinyurl.com/4ny52
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!
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
You may have heard of this nifty new technology called "compression" that allows you to get more effective data transfer out of a link. 10:1 compression on video is pretty trivial these days, which means you'd only need 175Mbps for that resolution (although you'd probably drop it down to 24 bit color).
I read the internet for the articles.
DivX is *VERY* high compression.
Think for a sec.
Let's use 640x480 as a sample res, 16 bit color, 30 fps.
640*480*16*30 = 147,456,000. 147Mbit/sec. Without audio. Most DivX files are on the order of 0.5 - 1MB/sec. With Audio. That's 150:1 to 300:1 compression.
TODO: Something witty here...
Ok, first problem. Yes, iPod supports USB 2.0. It also supports FireWire 1394. When 1394b comes out, Apple will support that. Apple's goal is to sell you an iPod whether you want to use USB, FireWire, swizzle stick, or anything else.
Nobody but the engineers and management of Sony, Cannon, Panasonic, and JVC know if the digital video market will migrate from dv. I doubt it, but my opinion and i'm a nobody.
Most devices don't need the power of FireWire? Personally, every device I've worked with will gobble as much power they can get if they can get it externally.
OK, I could be wrong on this but didn't FireWire get accepted as the standard to connect digital TV? Haven't followed this for a bit. But the FCC was leaning towards FireWire despite Microsoft's and Intel's begging them to accept USB 2. Why? FireWire 2.
When you talk about FireWire vs. USB 2.0, remember that FireWire 2 (1394b or Gigabit 1394) is rolling out. Makes USB 2.0 look slow just as 1394 made USB 1.0 look slow as frozen syrup.
Doing a static analysis of a dynamic world always a bit troubling unless the time difference (seconds, minutes, days) is immaterial. When not (months, years, etc.), the linearization gets shot to hell and your analysis falls apart.
The FireWire vs. USB battle isn't over. In fact, it's just begun because USB couldn't compete with FireWire a year or so ago. Once FireWire 2 rolls out, then we'll see if Intel's gambit to compete with FireWire will work out for them.
Let us go to the stars, dream new dreams, and renew the embers of hope that have long since grown cold.
Two Words: Hardware implementation.
Hell, for most screens (But not a game, probably) a simple run length encoding scheme would get you close to, if not over 10:1
TODO: Something witty here...
Instantly "Firewireless" popped into my mind, but that just doesn't have the same ring to it...
And where the hell has the "Post Anonymously" box gone?!
DivX/XviD/MPEG are all lossy codecs for natural looking video images. The math above just does not apply if you are thinking of a remote monitor situation.
You can already do a remote desktop with Remote Desktop Protocol on Windows XP at 802.11b speeds.