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802.11g... It's Official
JoeBuck writes "This article in CommsDesign reports that the IEEE has officially approved the IEEE 802.11g standard, as well as another standard (802.15.3) for shorter-range, very-low-power operation.
Two other standards designed to improve compatibility between different vendors' access points were also approved."
To me this only spells out the death of bluetooth as mentioned here and here
And I quote:
I seem to smell something burning... anyone else??
802.15.3 last I heard wasn't really "approved" by the Bluetooth SIG. In fact, the whole 802.15 working group was trying to take over engineering aspects of Bluetooth from the Bluetooth SIG and leave the SIG to handle marketing, compliance, branding..etc.
But that didn't apparently happen because Bluetooth didn't want to wait X years for the next standard. Also, IEEE has a nasty habbit of ignoring backwards compatability when taking over a standard (we didnt design it, so who cares).
So, now we have this new, high rate, low power, WPN, that is supposed to be backwards compatabile with 802.15.1 (which is IEEE code word for Bluetooth. They built the 802.15.1 around the existing Bluetooth spec, but _changed_ it a bit).
Yet, no where, have i seen, an engineer say " 802.15.3 IS COMPATIBLE WITH Bluetooth". Maybe i missed that somewhere. Anyone know if this WPN will work with the present day number 1 WPN on the market?
Either way, this is really cool technology. High bandwidth, cheap, low power WPN means wireless KVM switchs among lots of other cool gadgets.
-malakai
-Malakai
A Dragon Lives in my Garage
802.11g is designed to interoperate with 802.11b, although the presence of "b" users in the same area does slow "g" down. Still, everyone is confusing effective rate (say, 20 Mbits/sec actually transmitted) with theoretical peak rate (54 Mbit/sec). "b" users are not getting 11 Mbits/sec; if they are lucky they are getting 5, and if they are surfing the web through DSL or cable modem they aren't even getting 2. When lots of people are using the same access point, the bottleneck isn't
In a year or two, most folks will ditch their "b" equipment for "g" and it won't matter.
How is it that I can go down to Fry's and buy a wireless router which supports a standard which hadn't even been approved? Or a DVD writer that may or may not be supported tomorrow, and which may or may not work with my DVD player? Or a graphics card which I may be able to be heard over if I scream loud enough, or which may play my games without crashing me to the desktop every two seconds.
Sure, competing standards a A Good Thing, but only if the companies that espouse them are willing to stand by them until the consumer has gotten their money's worth out of them. I constantly worry that my growing DVD collection will only be useful as a set of dinner plates in the near future, because of some new and exciting standard which the industry wants to force on me.
Growth, prosperity, innovation, yakkety yak. All I want is to pay some money and have something useful for a number of years. How many people are getting rich suckering us into the latest and greatest technology every year?
The great thing (to my thinking) about 802.11g is not the 54mpbs (which realistically is a throughput of only about 20-25mbps at best) but rather the power requirements.
Portable users are and always will be the mainstay of the Wireless Networking market and as performance machines come out the fight to keep battery life up is also going strong.
The Pentium-M and it's chipsets help this a great deal (but don't get me started on Centrino, that's just a marketing scam). However, one of the big winfalls for portable users will be the prevalence of 802.11g networks. They require half of the power of an 802.11b network and transmit data about 4 times faster.
This is the real prize you earn for switching to 802.11g.