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WiMax: When, Not If
Omega1045 writes "An article over at SiliconValley.com got me excited about the new WiMax Technology that over 140 companies and organizations are pushing. The article is a little low on the technical side of things, but discusses a possible 10-mile range for the wireless technology. Many see this as a nice solution for the "last mile" problem. Similar technologies have seen a lot of hype before, but with the likes of Intel, Dell, British Telecom, AT&T and bunch of the Ma Bells, I think one can be forgiven for getting a little excited. If you are still skeptical, you can download the 'Complete Guide to WiMax.'"
It is amazing what happens when the FCC de-regulates part of the spectrum.
Humor from a Genetically Molested Mind
Ten miles?!?! goodbye, boring lectures, Hello slacking off at school!
-ND
What's with the Wikipedia link? Do people not know what the word "excited" means?
...but in reality, this is just another stopgap until homes, curbs, etc. have better last-mile wiring capabilities (i.e. from SLIC huts and such).
Wireless remains a shared medium, of generally limited bandwidth...therefore, limited usefulness. This is just because it's a unguided medium. 10 miles sounds nice, but this is going to require specialized equipment because the signal losses between 10 GHz and 66 GHz are pretty significant over any distance, and will probably require line-of-sight as current wireless networks do.
Definitely a hyped up technology, I say.
// Agent Green (Ian / IU7 / KB1JQO)
// IEEE 802.3: All 10base Are Belong To Us
Perhaps you meant Baby Bells... or maybe there was some sort of polygamy.
How about that idea? Wouldn't that be a great competition for expensive mobile phone plans?
Though I do honestly hope WiMax succeeds, there's absolutely no gaurantee that they will be able to get the consumers to buy these things like hotcakes. Quite franky 802.11b at 11MBit/s is good enough to carry (US anyways) consumer broadband which averages around 1.5Mbit down 384kbit up. Until broadband reaches the speeds where a consumers WiFi link is what's slowing them down, that's when we'll get the upgrades. But in the meantime, unless people suddenly have a real use for the increased speed/distance, I can't see think taking off so quickly.
Wimax has been in the planning stages for a couple of years now. I can't believe it's just now hitting the radar screen..
In any case the specified range is 30km (a lot more than 10 mi), and over rugged terrain. Perfect for rural, or forested areas (where I live).
BTW, Intel is one of the biggest names pushing the standard.
Since there is no broadband or cable service here, I have been bugging the local providers to put a base station on my property in exchange for service. We'll see what happens.
Broadband WarDriving $ WAN parties! I welcome our BIG hot-spot providing overlords!
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
Not to brag, as I have no idea how fast WiMax professes to be, but:
I've already got a functional network, where endpoints are all about 10 miles away from a central access point. It runs 5.7GHz Motorola Canopy, and shoots several megabits per second in any direction over flat terrain.
No funky amps, no wacky antennas, no broken FCC regs, and no lossy coaxial feedlines. Just a clear line of sight and some out-of-the-box Canopy gear. It works well enough that I don't particularly care that it is proprietary.
What advantage does WiMax offer? (And remember, over here in the real world, tens-of-GHz frequencies are usually not advantageous.)
Kid-proof tablet..
I smell hype.
Donate background CPU time to fight cancer.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Won't we need a pretty big radio transmitter to transmit to an access point that is 10 miles away? Wouldn't it drain laptop battery in no time?
When I first heard of the concept of a wireless internet connection, I thought it would be cool to set up a network between my friends. Unfortunately, HAM packet radio required a license, and 802.11 doesn't have enough range. But this finally does.
So you're thinking, "what's the point?" The point is that it would be completely free of government and commercial control. Kind of like Freenet, but with better performance.
But that's not the cool part. The cool part is that with the right hardware and enough people, it could spread beyond my circle of friends and eventually replace the wired internet! It would be what the internet should have been -- completely decentralized and in control of the people.
Now, I realize that WiMax at 10 miles and not that much bandwith won't be completely adequate, but at least it's a start.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Wardriving is history now.
Imagine the potentials of hacking in to systems by just sitting inside your room - welcome to Airdriving.
On the other hand, this standard will be very useful for new countries(eg: India) trying to play big in the broadband scenario, since it needs very less infrastucture(no need to laying cable's).
The WLAN cards will become cheaper once the taiwanese starts to clone.
10 Miles isn't anything special. We use normal 802.11b and reach about 10 miles now, we just put a flat panel antenna and a 100mw Cisco 350 / 200mw Engenius bridge / 100 mw Smartbridge bridge at the client location. Simple.
I suspect WiMAX will just cause us interference headaches, although since we can take 802.11b (what, a few hundred feet) adn stretch it to 10 miles, I wonder what we'll be able to do with WiMAX.
Simply put, fail-safe encryption does not and will not exist. Due to increases in computer processing power, encryption is by definition a temporary safeguard. I can't see how any Wifi standard could claim to be hacker-proof for not only the near future, but for the next 10 years. All we can hope is that the engineers of this standard do what they can to maximize the span of time it would take an off-the-shelf computer to break your encryption with brute force. If you need something stronger, you'll need to pay more for your Wifi solution.
This may not sound like wonderful news to those countries with a comprehensive telecommunications infrastructure, such as the USA, Asia and parts of Europe, but for countries with smaller infrastructures, it's great news.
South Africa, where I live, has a 'first world' infrastructure for the majority of uses, but for broadband internet, we simply don't cut it yet. Broadband is priced at a premium, with your average 512k ADSL connection 3 times the cost of developed countries and capped at 3gig a month.
Recently, we saw the introduction of Sentech Mywireless, using technology from IPWireless - the UMTS Standard. They had some major teething problems initially, but seem to be stabalising thier operations after loosing a lot of customers due to poor service implementation (read: underestimated the demand)
Later this year, a competitor, iBurst, who are already conducting tests, will roll out thier service with an official opening in the first quarter of 2005 - they currently run the Lotto network in South Africa. They'll be using IntelliCell technology from ArrayComm.
And finally, our wonderfull national telecom company (Telkom), who still hold the monopoly despite deregulation, will be introducing WiMax technology to South Africa in 2005 in partnership with Intel.
For a country starved of broadband options for years, wireless technology has become "the holy grail" of broadband for South Africans.
A slashdotting - you get the stick first and then the carrot !
Also my English teacher (read tree hugger) mentioned that you get a headache when you are in one building since it got a cell antena on top. It is noticeable.
I'd say it's far more likely that any indoor headaches would be caused by bad air quality and/or ergonomics than elecromagnetic radiation.
I'm not saying it's impossible, but there is very little scientific evidence to support your teacher's claims. That I know of anyway, feel free to prove me wrong.
.: Max Romantschuk
As many people are sure to point out, there's the possibility of using WiMAX for VoIP but that's too blas'e. What would be interesting is providing a mobile like user experience using VoIP+WiMAX, thereby challenging the commercial wireless carriers (read guys with big $$). But before we get to that we need to note that for VoIP (sent over any wireless medium) to rival a cellular voice offering, a user really has to be mobile and should be able to carry a small piece of equipment a la a mobile phone to be able to access the network. With VoIP, using say Wi-Fi, the user is expected to lug around at least a laptop and if she doesn't have one, she's got to be tied to the PC at home. If a truly mobile, VoIP service could be provided over something like WiMAX which uses free spectrum, just imagine the savings that could be made by whoever's providing the service.
:-)
Coming back to WiMAX, there is better scope to channel VoIP traffic (along with user mobility) over WiMAX than over WiFi for several reasons, bandwidth being only one of them. For any kind of wireless telephony to be taken seriously, the handoff problem needs to be solved in a clean way. The commercial cellular offerings have no issues in handling handoffs and in providing true mobile service over large geographical areas. With Wi-Fi's range being much shorter than that of WiMAX, providing wireless telephony with handoffs over Wi-Fi for even a medium sized city will mean that the entire region be covered by hundreds (if not thousands) of access points. This complicates both the RF network planning as well as managing of the core network (the backend) which actually handles and routes the calls/handoffs. With WiMAX's larger range, the complexity of these problems gets reduced.
So how does geek community make money out of this ?
1. Try to make a portable WiMAX device which can handle VoIP on the lines of a mobile phone. This is not as difficult as it sounds. The VoIP protocols have been ported to embedded devices before. All this device would need are a WiMAX chip, VoIP protocols, some DSP to handle digitized voice and a minimal user intrface (at least to start with).
2. Get the core network to handle multiple WiMAX access points, do handoffs, route calls etc. This is also not too difficult. There's free software for things distributed call handling, fault management etc, some of it even from telecom companies like Ericsson.
3. Get taken seriously. This is probably going to be the biggest challenge (Sigh !) and I don't know how the average geek can do that
4. This is the step we all love - Profit !!!
Using WiMAX to run Skype etc over it isn't that great. If someone could go to the next level and use the range + bandwidth of WiMAX to actually provide a cellular like mobile service, then there's scope for making a lot of money.
Sorry for the long post.
People still believe there are physical limitations for anything???? Dude, people could have sworn to death that the earth was flat, that the maximum speed a human body could be submitted to was 100kph.
Some even demonstrated that no particle could travel faster than light. Yet, all of these things had been proved false.
Moore's law (which is more an observation than a law) is about the first one that seems true so far. Brute force power of a computer doubles every 18 month or so. So if we can brute force a 56bit key today, we will be able to break a 256bit key in about (256-56)*18 month, which account for approx. 300 years. Who would dare say what would or would not happen in 300 years!!??
Because the pitiful post you link to fail to account for the fact that power consumption per MIPS tend to decrease. Probably not as fast as the MIPS increase, but definitely close. I had a 400W PSU for my first 286, and I still have one for my P4.
So after all, a computer in 300 years might consume the same wattage for a cpu speed multiplied by 200. So it will finally consume the energy consumes today to break a 56bit key, to break a 256bit key.
Ah!
Write boring code, not shiny code!
Its interesting about the head aches - WiFi is currently operating over 2.4Ghz (the resonant frequency of water, which is a signifcant component of humans).
More pseudo-science/urban legend BS non-facts. 2.4 GHz is NOT the resonant frequency of water. Here's a link explaining why microwave ovens use ~2.4GHz, Microwave Oven Principles of Operation, which is where this so called 2.4GHz resonace seems to originate from. And here's a quote from that page for those too lazy to click the link and read.
What is significant about 2.45 GHz? Not that much. Water molecules are not resonant at this frequency. A wide range of frequencies will work to heat water efficiently. 2.45 GHz was probably chosen for a number of other reasons including not interfering with existing EM spectrum assignments and convenience in implementation. In addition, the wavelength (about 5 inches) results in reasonable penetration of the microwave energy into the food. The 3 dB (half power) point is about 1 inch for liquid water - half the power is absorbed in the outer 1 inch of depth, another 1/4 of the power in the next inch, and so forth.
Industrial ovens still often operate at 915 MHz and other frequencies near 6 GHz are also used.
Water has numerous resonances over the entire spectra range, but the lowest frequency resonance is the rotational resonance is around 24 GHz. Other resonances occur in the millimeter wave range through the infrared.
Rampant Ninja related crimes these days...Whitehouse is not the exception