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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?"
We need a robust future expandable standard. My school has changed wireless technologies campus-wide 3 times in 3 years!
Darwinian selection will enventually work its magic through the different standards. P.S Don't answer me betamax, betamax didn't survive because the tape length wasn't suited for pr0n, so it's natural VHS took over.
\u262D = \u5350
Narrow the beam more and more, up the frequency more and more, and eventually you get a laser modem :-)
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42.
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How the fuck do you think the future becomes clear? Let the competing standards thrash it out and the result will lead us towards are wireless future. The early adopters take the risk that the choices they make may be incorrect, but thats how we get to where we want to be.
With enough signals bouncing around we won't have to buy microwaves anymore.
What's the harm in competition here? The wireless spectrum is finite; it's in our interest to kick around technologies until we can agree on one that's the cleanest, most efficient use of the space available.
A good first step would be to shut off analog TV and radio. That bandwidth is too valuable for us to just sit on.
domain combinatorics
when it becomes the past.
We create it in the present.
KFG
Isn't the whole point of releasing it now that it CAN compete with other standards and maybe if its better enough (or more popular enough) it can still win?
I beleive if they waited for the future to be clearer there could already BE a new standard and they would have lost.
We can handle only twelve wireless technologies.
Well they have $15 million in funding to go out and do the R&D work on Gigabit rate wireless. The worst thing that can happen is that they fail miserably, but I'm all for them spending some money on developing a new product.
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With a better open standard. Imap versus Pop3, for instance.
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.
Many movies that take place in the future seem to still use hard lines. The matrix is a prime example. My question is why didnt they just use wireless (WiMAX or the like)? It would hurt less and they could jack in from up to 30 miles away! Granted using current wifi, agent smith could easily hack the poor encryption. But from what I hear WiMAX has good potential.
Does the world really need another player when the future is still so unclear?
Isn't that exactly when you need as many different minds working on a problem? The future will clarify itself.
What an idiotic statement (and it is a statement, disguised as question). The future is determined by the choices we make today. More choices allows us to pick the best of those available, thus resulting in the "best future".
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Grandma Simpson & Lisa are singing "How many roads must a man walk down?" together.
Homer overhears and says, "Eight!".
Lisa: "That was a rhetorical question!"
Homer: "Oh. Then, Seven!"
Lisa: "Do you even know what 'rhetorical' means?"
Homer: "Do I know what 'rhetorical' means?"
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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))
They can all exist, except for one, 802.11 needs to be fucking shot.
Insecure, unscalable, and the newest access points are flooding the 2.4 ghz by using all 11 channels as opposed to behaving and using one.
802.11 has ruined the 2.4 ghz spectrum, I ever start my own wireless ISP, I won't even try to use 2.4 ghz radios.
--Nuintari
slashdot : where an opinion can be wrong.
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.
In this world of unmolested monopolies, cartels, and rampant corporate mergers, have we so lost sight of the benefits of competition that we *complain* when we see it? Are we really that brainwashed?
The analog dials go up into the 60s, but you're lucky if you can pick up more than five or six stations most places, and most people have cable or satellite anyway. Most of it's going to waste. Open the bandwidth to the public and let TV networks set up video on demand instead. I mean look at this thing: it's unspeakably crowded. Public channels are tiny slivers, yet they're the hottest use of spectrum around. Surely this could be simplified and opened dramatically.
Of course, when the government can just sell public spectrum at a tidy profit for its own needs, what do you expect.
Radio is pretty crowded though, I wouldn't mess with it. Really though, if there were advertising-supported free digital/satellite radio we wouldn't need that either! But of course, AM/FM radios are tiny, simple, cheap things these days, and there are a ton of them. Until digital receivers are more common in cars it's foolish to think of replacing them.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
"Also it is still used by film majors for its higher quality."
First, this is a good article here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betamax
But to your point:
No, it isn't. You're thinking about the pro version of Beta known as Betacam, which I believe uses similar tapes, but a different technology. A description can be found here:
http://betacam.palsite.com/format.html
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
Production studios continued using Beta for quite a while, even startups after the "war" ended. There was a measurable technical superiority here. Your post conveniently ignores the fact that Sony wanted a lot of money to license Betamax as a format from vendors, and JVC remembered how ineffective this was for their parent corporation fifty years before with FM radio patents. Sony has a history of losing battles not because their technology is inferior, but because they only value outsiders by what kind of revenue stream they might represent. They're the last bastion of Japanese xenophobic imperialism, and it shows.
"Made up/misattributed quote that makes me look smart. I am on
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.