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How Many Wireless Technologies Can We Handle?
Golygydd Max writes "The space for high-speed wireless networking is getting mighty crowded. Techworld reports that a new company, Sibeam, has entered the fray, hinting at a 60GHz technology to compete with the likes of Wimax, UWB and the others. Does the world really need another player when the future is still so unclear?"
The golden rule: THe higher your radio frequency, the harder it is to pass through solid objects.
If you thought 2.4Ghz was a bitch through layers of sheetrock, just imagine 60Ghz. Hell, you might as well be using infrared to transmit as it's basically a line-of-sight transmission anyways. Unless of course, you boost the gain. But damn, the radiation levels would be pretty damn high.
Life is not for the lazy.
When companies can't even make cards for 802.11 that support open kernels [bsd, linux] because "it's too hard" or whatever, ..., what hope have we for new standards?
I mean as it stands most retail wi-fi cards don't work in linux [except for prism54 intersil style which are hit and miss].
The problem isn't the underlying standard [though I'd say it's overtly complicated for such a simple idea] it's the idiots running the decisions.
I mean if a handful of ***amateur radio*** folk can make a 56K link work OVER KILOMETERS of space... why can't "the best and brightest" make a 11Mbps network work in a 100ft area with OSes that are well available and documented?
And it isn't even that you have to write drivers. Make a good card and open the interface up and people will write the drivers FOR YOU.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
My book with this info is at home, but IIRC, 60 GHz is one of the trouble spots for RF transmission because of absorption by atmospheric oxygen. This phenomena is exploited for some secure radios.
(S(SKK)(SKK))(S(SKK)(SKK))
Honestly, BetaMax was not, in practice, a better standard than VHS. It may have had perceptable quality improvements (though the jury is out on this), but that was more than made up for by VHS's early ability to record an entire two hour movie on a single cassette.
Sony essentially put out a format that was impractical. VHS beat it initially and immediately took off as a video recording technology that did what people wanted it to do. Once Sony fixed the problems, it was too late, and VHS was still wiping the floor with it.
VHS was objectively better, even if in some, largely unimportant area, BetaMax may have had a small technical advantage. The technical advantages of VHS were more important than those of BetaMax.
A good comparison might be with, given this is Troll Tuesday and Slashdot, cars (because cars are the standard Slashdot analogy area, and because on TT I can joke about that.) Electric cars are less poluting, more efficient, and theoretically more responsive than their gas guzzling cousins (assuming we're not talking about milk floats.) But given their short range, the gas powered car is, right now, the superior vehicle.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Yeah, for the sake of roaming access on my laptop at home, I have an AP, but I use strong crypto from the router (An opnbsd box, running ipsec and pfauth), to secure it. Securing wireless the good way isn't too tough, but my big beef is with how the system was designed.
They essentially took ethernet, and shoved it into the air. 802.11 uses collision detection, just as ethernet does. The problem is, 802.11 has no ability to notify the clients of each other's existence, so if you are sitting right next to each other, fine, you'll see each other, collision detection does its job. However, stick two clients on opposite sides of the access point, out of range of each other, and you have a problem. Neither client can see the other, so collision detection fails miseraby. You get what is know as the invisable neighbor problem. You are firing, your neighbor is firing, neither of you are aware of the other, and the access point is overwhelmed. Performance suffers for both people, and 802.11 still needs to fucking die.
--Nuintari
slashdot : where an opinion can be wrong.
You might want to check out this article written a few years ago by Steven Den Beste (a former Qualcomm engineer) on some of the differences between GSM and CDMA. GSM is just a form of TDMA. It actually looks like our track record is pretty good. Except for the part about old fashioned GSM dominating the US market now as well. Seems like another case of VHS winning over Betamax. But I think GSM will have to switch to some form of CDMA eventually anyway.
IMO these standards are red herrings anyway. What we need is for cell phones to drop back into the Mhz range again so that they can penetrate building walls. These microwave frequencies are not so good for that. It takes too much power to do it. People don't just use cellphones in their cars anymore.
And 60 Ghz is ridiculous. It will be bouncing off solid objects like a radar gun. You may as well use a modulated laser beam. It will take huge amounts of power to penetrate even the thinnest building walls.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.