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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?"
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.
Bluetooth is much slower, typically around 700kbps. Bluetooth consumes much less power, so don't expect Bluetooth to be pushed out on your headset or wireless mouse, for example.
-- Andyvan
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."
Beverly hills 802.1*
next weeks episode features 50% more petty vendor squabbling and competitors attempt to sabotage.
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.
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
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?
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
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.
"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.