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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?"
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 :-)
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
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
We can handle only twelve wireless technologies.
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.
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.