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Ultrawideband May Stall Before It Starts
judgecorp writes "The IEEE's group for faster Wi-Fi, 802.11n has reached the end-point, with the Intel-backed TGn Sync proposal taking the lead. This is a contrast to the ultrawideband world 802.15.3a, where the competing proposals are slugging it out. Indeed, the vendors could be in for more trouble than they expect getting UWB past regulators in Europe." From the article: "Within the next two years, we should start to see fast wireless links based on ultrawideband (UWB), taking the place of short-range connections such as USB and Firewire, and providing fast data links between consumer goods. Chipmakers are now on the verge of creating the silicon, and vendor groups are completing the standards.But the technology may have trouble getting a world market, as regulators wrestle with the objections of the cellphone industry. UWB standards are in deadlock at the IEEE; but what the regulators say matters far more to the future of the technology."
When can I get my "mofasterbiggerwider-fi?"
taking the place of short-range connections such as USB and Firewire, and providing fast data links between consumer goods Wasn't bluetooth suposed to do this? How fast is bluetooth, anway? I guess the advantage would be the distance... BT only allows a few meters at best.
The Digital Couture Collection
802.11n faster than 100 Mbit/s. Are we for real here. Isn't this the 4th protocol released in 2 years? Why don't we wait just another year for 1000 Mbit/s.
It's obvious why this is doomed to fail: we all know that all good networking-related standards are in the 802.11 range. If we start with 802.15 now, soon enough, we'd actually be able to tell them apart easily some day! And that obviously can't be had - how else are the "experts" going to make money then? :)
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
Why are regulators even listening to the cell phone industry? Existing monopolies should not be allowed to control new technologies in their own best interests.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
First show it's safe, for people *and* for other devices. UMTS was accepted way too fast.
Beverly hills 802.1*
next weeks episode features 50% more petty vendor squabbling and competitors attempt to sabotage.
Does this mean I will be able to pick up the internet in my teeth?
Cool beans! I wonder what internet pr0n would be like then?
I hope this gets the go ahead. I am for one a fan of PDAs and other such types of tech. Having this kind of wireless network would more then likely be a boost to that market. That and VOIP would benefit too. It would be nice to see all data and voice traffic over the same protocol.
Also one more thing, if the US government can make a network of highways for the physical world, why not do the same for the digital world?
Wont this lead to lots of overhead on the connections for encryption/security? If everyone is using wireless to connect all their printers, keyboards, mice, ect, there exists a very real threat of data theft over the air, especially with the range of WiFi compared to existing Bluetooth devices. Forget spyware keyloggers on your machine, how about ones across the street!
We'll need a secure channel of communications for every device, even one as low bandwidth consumption as a keyboard.
what kind of bandwidth does uwb supposedly promise to support?
(if there are competing standards, what are each of their bandwidths?)
The core objection is that ultrawideband steps on other people's spectrum used by other applications such as cell phones, satellite broadcasts, GPS, etc. Proponents claim that because the technology is ultrawideband, it deposits very little energy in any narrow slice of spectrum used by these other users. Opponents worry about what happens when a UWB transmitter is near one of there devices (yes, it can interfere with GPS) or if the world becomes saturated with UWB devices.
The problem is that each UWB device will raise the noise level in all the spectral bands that it covers. With enough UWB devices (or short enough distances to a UWB device), the utility of these other bands will drop. If you paid 5 billion dollars for something, you might scream if someone else started degrading the performance of your investment.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Sorry you asked now, aren't you...
The "end-point" of the IEEE standards process is when the standard is issued, which is probably a year away in the case of 802.11n. The fact that one proposal is inching ahead of another in the voting is notable, but there's still plenty of work to be done.
Of course, UWB technology is designed to pretty much not interfere with anything else, and it's far better at it than WiFi, which has already annoyed the regulatory environment by being wildly successful in large part *because* its development isn't limited by regulators. So 99% of the "interference" is "people might buy UWB instead of 3G", but that's expressed in technical terms of "they might garble a few bits on our services which are fairly robust, have built-in ECC, and run TCP protocols which detect and correct for errors", so the 3G owners ask for unreasonably low power levels for UWB and the regulators go along with them. In reality, the equipment will probably have user-adjustable signal levels, they'll get type-approved with the Eurocrat settings, and users will immediately crank them up to US power levels, which still won't bother anybody.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
UwB is nice, but remember it is a two-edged sword. the faster it is, the more bandwidth it takes, the more it interferes with other things.
"Give a man a fire, he's warm for a day, set a man on fire, he's warm for life."
You all can kiss my ass for your delay tatics on who has the better implementation of this technology. Do we care? No! I could care less who wins the standard war. With every new technology, always a company wants to put their agenda first instead of the technology benefical factors it offers over obsolete technlogy like bluetooth , IR and yes 802.11. UWB is posed to take serious revenue away from carriers which would explain this delayed tatic.
Do you v.34 or V.92 or wait its a Win modem? Would you get on with the standards war and let us consumers decided. We can have both but the point is get on with UWB. I went to EEE meetings in new york 3 years ago in regards to this. Let me say one thing, its really corparate driven.
So im not suprised UWB lacks to exist the research rooms.
GO BURN UWB HELL
FTA: The problem is, those speaking for the telecoms industry sometimes find themselves arguing for more stringent controls on UWB devices than on "unintentional radios", ordinary electronic equipment - or even from the thermal radiation produced by human beings. This tends to irritate the vendors and UWB proponents, as it seems to suggest that the European mobile industry is not objecting to the noise - but the simple fact that people are communicating without their say-so.
Emphasis mine.
What?
And instead of Shannon Doherty and her tv brother, we can have Ellen Feiss and that Dell dude. Awesome!
Does judgecorp work for Intel? The IEEE group voted 56:44% for the TGnSync protocol to become the standard instead of WWiSE, far short of the minumum 75% needed for approval (the 12% lead is IEEE news itself calls the vote "inconclusive", hardly the "end-point". Rather, everyone involved believes that the two consortia will revise their specs to merge them for the strong consensus required for approval, in a process that will continue for at least another year.
I note that even in the TechWorld article, by Peter Judge (which won't specify just how far from decisive was the actual vote), doesn't quite distort the status as "reached the end-point". But the Slashdot story, submitted by judgecorp, spins it even further than than TechWorld. Again, does judgecorp work for Intel, as well as TechWorld, paid to spin IEEE news more when there's less editorial oversight?
--
make install -not war
Ellen: Um, honey...I have something to like, tell you. My pregnancy test was like beeep beep beep beep beep...um, yeah. Its like, a bummer.
Dell Dude: Dude, you're getting an abortion!
In the software world we're used to super-duper-ultra-wideband spaces: MD5 hashes are a good example. You don't have to bother decolliding MD5 hashes -- there are so many that no two documents are likely to ever collide by chance. But you can't just "add more bits" to the electromagnetic spectrum: once you get down below about a centimeter, you might as well be using infrared instead of radio.
It's the same problem as those RF-excited plasma light bulbs that were all the rage a while ago: the first 10,000 or so work great -- but by the time you deployed 10 of 'em to every household in America, nobody's radio would work any more.
Therefore the bandwidth is almost unlimited, by definition. You could almost think of it as sending data in parallel rather than serially. It promises very high bandwidth, which you might think is great, free and easy with no consequences. But there's no such thing as a free lunch.
OK, so what they're really doing is swapping from the time domain to the frequency domain to transmit data. What this does is add noise to all of the frequencies it operates over, and with a name like Ultra Wide Band as you might suspect will operate over a lot of frequencies... Which is why the more traditional operators are pissed, it's very likely to start spewing random crap all over the frequencies they use.
Deleted
while not for anything like broadband, the new Apple Powerbooks are the first machines to ship with Bluetooth2.0
i do not know if BT2.0 has any range improvments? i assume not since it still is not intended to replace WiFi.
from apple.com:
Bluetooth 2.0+EDR, while still backwards-compatible with Bluetooth 1.x, is up to three times faster than its predecessors, offering a maximum data rate of 3Mbps. As the first company to certify a system supporting Bluetooth 2.0+EDR (enhanced data rate) specification with the Bluetooth Qualification Board, Apple continues to popularize Bluetooth technology.
http://www.apple.com/bluetooth/
GPS is broadcast from space
Mobile phones use GSM (mostly)
"The problem with UWB is that it works great for one single device, but not so great once you have 100 million of the buggers running around.There's only so much bandwidth in the whole spectrum, so the "low noise due to wide-band modulation" argument would not hold once millions of these devices got made."
I don't think you really understand the concern here. UWB's main caveat is that it would raise the noise floor, making traditional wireless signals *possibly* harder to decode. UWB has extremely short range, so there would be very few devices within interference range with each other; also since UWB sends data using impulses, traditional TDMA technology (which is used on cell phones - you don't see cell phone carriers supporting only one cellphone per tower, do you?) can be used to have many signal streams in the same area.
"In the software world we're used to super-duper-ultra-wideband spaces: MD5 hashes are a good example."
This is totally irrelevant. MD5 has no bearing to UWB.
"It's the same problem as those RF-excited plasma light bulbs that were all the rage a while ago: the first 10,000 or so work great -- but by the time you deployed 10 of 'em to every household in America, nobody's radio would work any more."
The power spectral density of UWB is extremely low; crappy cd-players and consumer electronics devices can cause more interference than a properly-design UWB transmitter.
Well, the analogy is a bit strained since it's between a noise floor limited discrimination and a single bit; but in both cases the problem is finding enough "signal space" to hold all the data you want to transmit.
Normal radios use a simple discriminator: the carrier frequency. UWB devices use a code-multiplex discrimator that operates on frequencies much as a hash function operates on bit values.
The rub is -- what is "properly designed" and how likely is it?
I'm such a gadget/wireless fan. I've been hyped about Bluetooth for 10 years. They said it wasn't going to get a foothold, but I'd say it's here to stay. v1.0 was slow but worked, now we've got v2.0 (in Apple's latest products of course, they're support is so critical). People never understood what BT was for - short-range and low bandwidth. Mice, keyboards, game controllers, headsets (!! still no good ones though).
/.
UwB is great because of it's radiowave penetration. It can go through a lot because of the spectrum it uses. WiFi degrades easily. Same w/BT. So there's a use for each technology, but not enough support and cooperation beteween vendors. Microsoft's first BT keyboard/mouse had a BT adapter w/a USB dongle for seperate use, but it didn't support any other BT devices! They fixed it in SP2.
Another thing, when are we going to coordinate __THE PEOPLES NETWORK__ and connect our personal WLANs together to form one big network? I heard about somebody near me in Parma, OH that was trying to get a PING from here to Cali through consumer WiFi networks links together. I like this idea. With WiFi/cellular phones coming out, that'd be great.
I love
Do or do not. There is no try. --Yoda
UWB uses time devision, not frequency division. I'm not familiar with the implementations under consideration by the IEEE, but in theory all UWB signals are identical. The encode information by existing or not existing at a specific moment in time.
i forget
Why don't we just get going on subspace? Than we won't have the problems we have today with this pesky electromagnetic sprectrum.
"taking the place of short-range connections such as USB and Firewire"
Firewire can go 100 meters. That's the same length as 10BASE-T and 100BASE-T. That definitely qualifies as at least "medium-range" in my book.
To me, "short-range" means "same room". When I can run a cable between any 2 rooms in my house, that's no longer "short-range".
Firewire and USB are quite different. USB is OK for my mouse and keyboard -- you can't even buy a Firewire mouse or keyboard. But you can't run USB 100 meters, or at 800 megabits. You can't directly connect 2 computers with USB (without a special thingy in between, and a special driver). You can't do much DV with USB. You can't push 45 watts over USB.
Where's the "+/-1 WTF?" when you need it?
Normal range is going to be up to 10 meters (just short of 11 yards).
Sure, that's for the normal, tiny antenna. But as the parent posted about a TEMPEST van, these guys could actually receive, amplify, and display a computer screen from across the block, just from the EM radiation.
So the FBI guy ends up with an antenna filling his trunk, an antenna that looks like a auxillery cell or cb antenna. Still easier than trying to tap a 100Mbit or 1Gbit land line.
I don't read AC A human right
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethernet#History
there are 35 different versions of ethernet listed
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10_Gigabit_Ethernet
of 10gb ethernet ALONE there are 8 versions, and unless you think 10gb ethernet has been around since 1997? that's better than 4 in 4
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
UWB is not limited to 802.15 Bluetooth technology.
802.16 is working on much higher speed, than 802.11 series WLAN, protocols for WMAN applications for distances of 5km.
Keep in mind that speeds are often theoretical and that as users are added, bandwidth per user per cell goes down.