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?"

Comments

Sure, Why not.

[hungrygrue]

With enough signals bouncing around we won't have to buy microwaves anymore.

Re:Compete w/ WiMax?

[squiggleslash]

I'm afraid the pronounciation of "Beta" is "Bee, Tar", not "Better". ;-)

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.