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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?"
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.
I never spellcheck and I freely admit it. Save your karma for more worthwhile "lol erorrs" replies
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.
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.
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.
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.