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Faster Wireless Multimedia Streaming
prostoalex writes "The Wi-Fi Alliance approved Wi-Fi Multimedia (WMM) technology that allows packet prioritisation to the multimedia data streamed wireless LANs. Broadcom already announced that one of their access points and one reference design are WMM-certified. Other news outlets report that WMM will accelerate Wi-Fi adoption in consumer electronics and mobile devices."
If anyone ever actually supports that.
Isn't this just Quality of Service? Surely any decent wireless router manufacturer that doesn't already support QoS could add it with a firmware update. Or is this another scheme to get me to buy new wireless routing gear (first b, then g, now WMM)?
What am I missing here
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I wonder what the RIAA/MPAA will have to say about this...will they require that the streams be encrypted?
It'll be interesting to see how this plays out with those lawyers.
Tell the truth and you won't have so much to remember.
This really doesn't sound like anything that revolutionary, just another hack to speed up "multimedia" data on a WLAN. But the real interesting part is how they expect to put WiFi in, well, everything. Now I certainly have nothing against WiFi'ing everything, but I do worry that with so much WiFi, you could have some interfearence issues (much like UTexas had), and then you still have the problem that you loose pretty much all data security. Perhaps when they figure out a way to have WiFi APs automatically select the least used channel to reduce interfearance and they add in a good, strong, automatic, and mandatory encryption then perhaps we'll be seeing less ethernet ports and more WiFi antennas in products.
I didn't even think about that, but I imagine that a G type device can put out a pretty good sound broadcast, with prioritization (QoS in disguise) going on. Now compound that with phones or pdas that can read that signal and have a player that knows what to do with it. Now combine that setup that works for a few hundred feet with any of the plethora of ways to boost wifi signal strenght and you've got independent radio stations that can reach a real quantity of subscribers. For free (except equipment, since I believe it's been established that internet radio is license free as long as the broadcaster owns the original song he/she's playing).
The RIAA is gonna shit
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I'd be interested as to how they define which packets are multimedia, and which are data/text-based. It seems to me that there would have to be some sort of identifier on each packet in order to set a priority. As such, it sounds like it could easily be streamlined into a DRM scheme, so I wouldn't think that the RIAA/MPAA would mind at all.
Of course, I'm not a packet expert, so this ability may be available already...
Introducing Microsoft Vacuum 1.0 The first Microsoft product that doesn't suck.
My customers want RANGE. I need to be able to cover a large home with one AP (placed where ever it is most convenient) and cover the house and yard.
Humor from a Genetically Molested Mind
With all the discussion about city wide WiFi networks in Grand Haven, Philadelphia, Redmond, etc and disputes over WiFi right of ways at universities and stadiums, it is becoming more obvious that WiFi will be eroding the markets of tradition broadcast technologies... radio, television, cellular.
When I was at SXSW last year, not only could you listen to the authorized SXSW iTunes playlists, but hundreds of Mac using convention goers were sharing their playlists via Rendezvous.
With standards like WMM and applications like Skype, have we finally taken the airwaves back?