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FireWire Gets Ready to Go Wireless
mindless4210 writes "The 1394 Trade Association has approved a specification for the development of wireless FireWire applications, which will let 1394-enabled devices, both wired and unwired, to connect with each other. The new spec will enable communication between a variety of devices, such as set-top boxes, HDTVs, tuners, and DVD players, all of which will be able to interoperate in home networks. Officials speculated that in the future there could be plug-in cards for set-top boxes enabling wireless connection to DVD players and hard-disk drives. The trade association also said it will work with the WiMedia Alliance to jointly develop collaborative products."
Great! Now that I've got this awesome free internet connection from my neighbors I can look forward to getting HBO without cables too! The future looks bright!
Im dreaming ofa big bndwdth, That can resist the
Hi:
I wonder if this period will be remembered as the biggest soft tissue experiment in human history. Heck, I don't even sit next to people using cell phones or near micowave ovens.
They need to get away from the 1394 name. It's confusing for people. They should call it FireWireless!!!
*.02c
Wireless FireWire
Yes but can it charge my ipod?
Im dreaming ofa big bndwdth, That can resist the
On a hard drive of its own where the wife can't find it!
Wireless Firewire, aka Fire.
It's Bluetooth all over again!
Wireless Firewire... wouldn't that just be called "Fire"?
In Soviet Rush, today's Tom Sawyer gets high on you.
Guh! Wireless speeds of 400 Mbps...Any chance this can give you cancer?
I'll turn into a supernova and burn up everything. Well I'll turn into a black little hole and you'll turn into string.
FireWire local P2P? Torrent maybe? Sounds OK to me! You can keep your HBO, thanks, there's nothing on there worth watching anyway.
has anyone trademarked FireWireLess yet? Only a matter of time...
Real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time.
-- Terry Pratchett, Hogfather
Extending FireWire is one piece of the puzzle, and I for one am anxious to see the products that will result.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Can't we refine one and use it for all these different applications? Or are these different protocols content-specific? (i.e. some protocols are good with video, others are better with raw data?) I haven't seen anything showing this.
It's been around a while.
Really, Ethernet has achieved dominance over the wired infrastructure.
The 802.11 (x) standard has achieved pretty much dominance over the wireless infrastructure.
It seems to me that this may be just another competing standard that will introduce incompatibilities and vendor lockin down the track. How is this magically different to bluetooth, wap, etc????
Kewl....all the early adopters can run off and buy this kit....I'll try and find a cost-effective consumer solution that is secure.
Imagine the 5th generation of iPods with this capability. One could set up their iPod as the default music server in the car, walk in their home, change settings from inside the home, and drive off with no need to remove their iPod! This is the solution I have been seeking! The future is here, and although it lacks flying cars, I AM IN IT!!! T3H FUTUR3!!1!!!!
is it that bad seein a hot chick again? if i see a hot chick walkin down the hall i dont say "repost"
Can someone explain how "Wireless Firewire" is related to wired 1394, or how "Wireless USB" is related to USB, other than they are schemes approved by the same organizations? Is it all just marketing or do the technologies really have something in common?
Great...I love FireWire, and it amazes me how fast it lets me work with my iPod and DV Camcorder, but is there really a need for another wireless standard? We've got 802.11a/b/g, Bluetooth, and now soon wireless FireWire and wireless USB. Is there a reason why the industry can't just pick a wireless technology, and then use it? Or is it just the idea that FireWire products don't want to use USB tech, yada yada yada...
The industry doesn't sound very standardized to me right now...
Snider speculated that there could be plug-in cards for set-top boxes enabling wireless connection to DVD players and hard-disk drives.
Great, so I wasted all my time on a SFF MythPC for nothing... J/K. Actually, come to think of it, my home theater is almost wireless already. I pulled back the entertainment center the other day to plug in the X-Box and decided to do some cleaning up (Gasp!). It was like a fight to the death between the lonely geek and the green glowing tenticle creature from bad anime pr0n. Anyway, I ended up pulling out about 4 composite A/V cables, an S-Video cord, numerous cat-5 cables, and some Molex plugs that werent being used.
How the molex's got there is beyond me. I think the cat may have had something to do with it. Little Kerberos has had her evil eyes on me since then, maybe I distrupted her evil plan to take over the world... Or at least the home network.
Im dreaming ofa big bndwdth, That can resist the
maybe this will be the introduction to wireless mouses and keyboard :P
Maybe it will be useful for high speed channel changing.
Wireless Firewire... this reminds me of: If cats always land on their feet, what if you taped (duct tape) two cats back to back... what would happen then? If toast always lands butter side down, what if you buttered both sides and dropped it? If Firewire is cool wire, what if it was Wireless? Sounds to me like answers for another dimension...
- Your stupidity got you into this mess, why can't it get you out? -Will Rogers
While the article kindly reminds us that Firewire runs at 400 Mbps, there is no mention of range. How much data can you transfer through the air before you start to cook things?
Having everything on your desk talk via wireless Firewire seems feasible. But is it possible to have an entire house run at 400 Mbps, walls, RF sources, and all?
Seems like this might be an 802.11g type deal with 54MB on paper and a much lower real life value.
"Small start-up entrepreneurial companies are already going full bore on it. You'll be seeing some prototype products before the end of the year."
:-P
Oh! By the end of the year, I'll mark it on my calendar, these guys are always on time, especially when something is pushed out 6 months ahead of time!
The new Protocol Adaptation Layer (PAL) for IEEE 1394 over IEEE 802.15.3 was approved Monday.
PAL... Great, better mark that one off the calendar, looks like its not going to like my NTSC setup
Im dreaming ofa big bndwdth, That can resist the
Won't having wireless DVDs and such streaming across the waves just promote stealing data and movies?
The best way to predict the future is to invent it. -Alan Kay
Liar liar wireless bra and panties on fire.
Its not fireWIRE at all. Better names would be:
FireFi
WiFire
Fireless
FiFi
FireTooth
NAWP (not another wireless protocol)
This is a hacker's dream come true!
Why are there two standards that seemingly do the same thing? Firewire and USB are both industry standards, yet they seemingly are designed to connect peripherals to PCs. They both do a great job, but it doesn't make sense to have two competeing industry standards. After all, the point of a "standard" is to get everyone on board. Time for everyone to start working together! :)
One of the great things about firewire is that it can power devices.. I guess this is no longer the case. Time to break out the ol ac adapter with your new 'firewireless' adapter. Not to mention, any device I can think of would need a PS, or are they going to release external HDs with giant batteries now?
Hey, your username isn't inspired by the slowdive album of the same name is it? Good stuff.
I suspect some of the products that result may well be really, really stupid. Like the $17000 internet fridge which has apparently not sold very well, IIRC only a handful have been sold in Australia at this point...
(insert obligatory "that must be every Aussie with internet access/power" joke here)
Still, as you point out, there are some very cool applications for this stuff. I just don't expect Big Business to create them!
Real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time.
-- Terry Pratchett, Hogfather
Try the veal.
Is it going to retain FireWire's mesh-networking capability?
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
It'd be FireWireless
I do not respond to cowards. Especially anonymous ones.
Merely lacking wires doesn't automatically make everything magically easy to configure... in fact in some ways having wires leading from device to device actually helps configuration in many ways, and especially helps with troubleshooting.
I can't really see the average non-VCR-programming type being able to easily set up any more than about 3 wireless devices. Hell, I can program my VCR but it takes half an hour to get my TV, PS2, stereo, VCR and DVD player set up together...
Real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time.
-- Terry Pratchett, Hogfather
Team targets 802.15.3 for wireless video networks
is like SCSI versus IDE all over again.
I can't imagine (!!) how much harder it would be to setup your stereo with no wires../I?
Hosts
192.168.1.101 TV
192.168.1.102 AMP
192.168.1.103 DVD
192.168.1.104 DVR
192.168.1.105 AUX
Tell your AMP to play output from the TV
Tell your TV to watch and listen to either it self, your DVD, DVR, AUX, whatever.
Tell your DVR to watch the TV if you want to record something, or tell it to watch it self.
Burglars could wardrive for the best equipment, and hit specified houses. Great idea, but I would think that a wired alternative, like the existing coax you already use, might be the better choice. With handhelds, tho, this makes a bit of sense -- play your Sony Walkman through your stereo when you walk in from the car, for example. Aren't toys wonderful?
Zhrodague.net - I do projects and stuff too.
Yeah, the power thing is a bitch. You're absolutely right about the inherent difficulties. But I can't think about something that actually happened to me in my youth. I was about 7 or 8 years old, and I was haing a conversation with my mother.
"Man, I wish you could just play whatever movie you wanted to on your TV." (This was the mid-1970s, mind you) I continued, trying to be practical. "But it'll never happen."
Mom looked over at me and said, "Do you think the settlers crossing the midwest in their covered wagons could have even imagined television? Sometimes things that seem impossible turn out not to be so impossible after all."
Of course now I can pop a DVD of practically any movie I want and watch it at my leisure. I don't claim to have the answers to making the world wireless, but I have learned not to rule things out.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Humour error #11672 : joke missing. Please obtain some content or piss off.
Real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time.
-- Terry Pratchett, Hogfather
Agreed, it's part of the design.
Collisions do not use a significant proportion - normally. If they do, they indicate a problem. The problem can be as simple as trying to reach the maximums allowed (something like 180m cable in 5 segments, only 3 of which can have active nodes, between any two points on the network, and certain number of nodes on each segment). Back when I looked it up, I had a network within spec, and with acceptable losses, but under load the collisions were much > 10%.
Now I only worry when my switches are reporting "excessive late collisions" - reflecting a real problem such as a mismatch between full and half duplex operation.
And I still have 10M single-segment LANs in small sites with only a few nodes. I don't have any token ring LANs now. (anyone want to buy a MAU?)
As with previous response - the report you link recommends:
"minimize the number of devices on any given LAN"
and
"use high performance bridges and routers"
and gets more interesting..
"(5) Increase Channel Bandwidth
The more bandwidth available to the stations, the lower the likelihood that they can create short-term overload conditions. While no one should spend money wastefully, the judicious application of high-speed LAN technologies (e.g., Fast Ethernet or FDDI) on critical segments can reduce packet discard due to channel congestion.
(6) Solve the Capture Effect
The capture effect can be a major cause of frame discard when using modern, high performance hosts and Ethernet implementations. This is discussed in detail below.
3. Capture Effect
Capture effect is the term used to describe a well-known and understood idiosyncrasy of the Ethernet Medium Access Control (MAC) backoff algorithm [4]. It is considered a minor flaw in the original Ethernet design, but is now firmly
entrenched through formal specifications, international standardization, and numerous silicon implementations. Before the development of modern, high-performance LAN controllers and systems were possible, the effect was rarely
(if ever) seen, and did not impact higher layer protocol operation or user performance. The emergence of networked systems capable of offering continuous, high load to an Ethernet made the capture effect visible and focused attention on its impact and solutions."
[ goes on to describe in detail, with mention of solutions proposed at the time ]
Good report - I wish I had it at the time.
-- All your bass are below two Hz
SunRays can do some/most of this over fast Ethernet, plus you can move your entire session around to any SunRay unit in a different part of the building (never log out again).
It's kind of eerie to work in an office without the usual hum of computer disks and fans.
The cave men had fire without wires, and we're talking about how advanced we are. Hell, they didn't even have to worry about RF interference!
SIG 666 - Signature stolen by the devil
'Wireless FireWire' If this is the case, then shouldn't it simply be called 'Fire' :^)
I get 26mbs on my laptop. dlink router, PowerBook G3 series with a 3rd party wireless card. I don't see how you could even operate on 500kbs.
"You can tell the pioneers by the arrows in their backs"