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The Future of Wireless Connectivity
Unimonomous writes "CoolTechZone.com analyzes the future of wireless connectivity with WiMax standard. "WiMax is an upgrade from Wi-Fi and offers brilliant advantages over its predecessor. The obvious one being extended range (up to 15 miles), which means that establishing a few towers would pretty much make the entire city connected. Now this probably won't matter to those of us with 24/7 connectivity, but people living in rural and undeveloped areas would surely benefit from it." Update looks like the site buckled. Sorry.
Looks like CoolTechZone is down...second story today that the referenced article was unavailable...
Anyway, just so we have something to talk about...here's some info on WiMAX:
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~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
Wireless connectivity will open a lot of windows for future products. As mentioned in as EBay article regarding voice calls being free in the future, things like wireless networks will definitely make that a reality.
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Things you think are in the Constitution, but are not.
Is if my current ISP makes purchase a new antenna/modem. I shelled out $400 for the one I'm currently using so the thought of having a new equipment bill doesn't excite me much.
That said, it would be nice if I can get higher bandwidth for the same price. When they did an equipment upgrade at their network tower, I received twice the bandwidth for the same price (still a bit pricey at $65/month).
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
The added range will help, but there's lots of antennas out there that will give you good reliability over long distances.
.11, and I'm not sure it will succeed.
The bigger problem is line of sight distances. I've done some testing with this and have the advantage of living on top of a very big hill, within view of DSL - about 5km over a lake. We've gotten connections with very crude antennas already using GPS to line things up reasonably well.
The big limitation has always been line of sight, and WiMax does nothing to change this - and might hurt, if it fragments 802.11b. Wimax (802.16?) is not compatible with
..don't panic
Drill baby drill - on Mars
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Ok, let's say 5 years down the road most folks use WiMax for internet connectivity along the same lines of coverage that broadband follows. How secure are those connections going to be? With my cable modem at least i can stick a firewall between me and all the nasties out there. What I can't imagine is how Joe Schmoe is going to protect his PC enough so that he doesn't get comprimised by a hacker/slacker. People have enough of a time configuring their wireless routers...Now imagine having to connect to a tower 5 miles away where there's a lot of ohter folks doing the same thing. What can one do to protect themselves?
At least once their servers melted down.
"Teleporting Rodents with D-Cell Battery Displacement" theory -- IgnoramusMaximus (692000)
http://mirrordot.org/stories/effe3f9d48d28ed804ea6 9d34be7bfb1/index.html
Things you think are in the Constitution, but are not.
but people living in rural and undeveloped areas would surely benefit from it
Unless you are talking about automating your farm equipment with wifi, I doubt many rural areas will see this until far into the future.
Who is going to pay to set up a tower to give 20 people internet? The reason wimax is so attractive in cities is the user density. I suppose the point is that it is cheaper than laying new land lines in rural areas (where broadband capable lines may be absent)?
It doesn't seem likely to happen any time soon, though. And there is still the matter of wiring the towers. Unless you wanted them to route signals wirelessly... I wouldn't want to risk my data travelling hundreds of miles over air. Fifteen is bad enough.
Now, I think sites coud go ahead and start using WiMax to distribute content over several thousands PCs across the town using WiMax. They would be un-/.able then. But I think this might be illegal though? Something about massive bonnet comes to mind...
Some folk in our area can't get anything as they are too remote for lines, to hily for towers and those same hills and trees block sattelite access.
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
WiMAX is of interest to those in urban areas who are working to provide universal net access to even those who can't afford $50/month. I think Municipalities could probably find ways to offer free wireless internet in their communities if they are creative. For example, they could offer free municipal wireless with the excuse that they want to provide job search capabilities to everyone in their community. Also providing access to any local, state, or .gov site. And what about include access to any non-profit site, and also to any site offering free e-mail.
Add a little peer-to-peer networking between people using the same free networks and who needs any corporate advertisements or sites or access to the "private subscriber" side of the internet?
Abstinence is a government conspiracy. www.SafeSexZone.co
and they all relate to regulations. The FCC has, so far, taken a hands off approach to regulation of data services, both wireless and wired. This approach is having an effect of establishing new networks, or seems to be. The problem is that all these new networks are being built by companies that plan to make money from distributing digital content... and we ALL know how sticky that problem is. For instance, music and video distribution is tightly being strangled by the *AA, and MS is trying to get in on the game too, with DRM'd content. All of these efforts are good, and believe me, WiMax is a *GOOD* thing.
The problems are content and distribution. Right now, plans are being made for IPTV and radio, and many many things that are digital in nature, all of which make life better or easier to cope with. Still, copyright and patent law will fsck it up if changes are not made now... Later is no good, the changes need to be made now....
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Who is going to pay to set up a tower to give 20 people internet?
Good point, but then why is the world's largest wireless cloud in rural Oregon?
Seems to me that we should pay less attention to trying to tell people what they want and how they should all wear the latest fashion and use the latest $2000 laptop and more time in noticing that they are buying hybrid cars instead of SUVs, buying $500 laptops with Linux or BSD instead of $2000 laptops, and maybe they want to install high-speed wireless in rural areas because when you're driving the truck, combine, baler, or other farm machine around your giant farm you find it kind of hard to get near a land line and short-range wireless.
If people ignored the elitist cruft we get from the supposed Elites more often, the world would be a better place, and we wouldn't be wasting all that money in foreign wars for no reason.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Nothing worse than exposing your php/mysql site with an error message. Hello.... security?
(let's hope the website is fixed soon)
After the FCC ruling regarding DSL lines, this might be a way for Internet providers to keep providing high-speed network connections once the telecoms close off their DSL lines and refuse to provide them for the other ISPs.
"Recent figures suggest that since 2000, the US has dropped from third to 16th among nations worldwide in terms of per capita broadband access. Bob Hale, owner of American Onion, shows how he uses a laptop with wireless capabitlities from a remote, rural site at his onion fields in Hermiston, Oregon
You do realize that The Onion is a parody newspaper, right?
In the future there may be only wireless service for consumers, due to lower cost of deployment. Given a certain spectrum width, wireless has less data carrying capacity due to the need for agressive noise correction. Also, with wireless you can't increase capacity by laying a second piece of coax or fiber beside the first. In congested areas (neighbourhoods of large apartment buildings, etc), the combination of high use, high RF noise, and complex surfaces (walls, etc) could seriously tax WiMAX. Fortunately these same areas are where the cost of deployment for coax and fiber is lowest.
But didn't I read somewhere that the Feds/FCC were going to open up some of the UHF/VHF frequencies currently used for TV broadcasts? Wouldn't that allow even better coverage?
Seems to me that the problem with WiFi and even WiMax is that they use such high frequencies, that the signal can't get "through" much of anything. Trees are enough to screw up the signal. If they could use freqencies in the ~100 Mhz range that VHF TV broadcasts use, they would be able to go through most stuff. Seems to me like that is what will eventually happen.
Will large ISPs be able to provide high-speed access at current prices if municipalities provide lower speed access for free? I get the sense that many ISPs will decide that they can't make any money providing access to a limited number of customers who want truely high-speed access everyone will be stuck using the "free" service provided by the government. How much insentive will they have to keep making the service better?
So if Slashdotting shuts it down I guess that means that Slashdot give a new meaning to "Breaking News." Don't let the Republicans' figure this one out or they'll Slashdot all the Liberal Media. Which would give a new meaning to "No News Is Good News." Might make a good Hack-a-Day: "Republicans use Slashdot to Silence Liberal Media." Maybe that's why all searches for "Congress Acts Without Delay" are all 404's.
"Now this probably won't matter to those of us with 24/7 connectivity, but people living in rural and undeveloped areas would surely benefit from it"
The problem is that there are not enough people in those areas to make it profitable.
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
Just from the intro (site still buckled) it sounds like an overly hyped analysis of 802.16. Sure, the technology promises to provide wireless broadband to the masses and to some extent that is correct, however 15 miles is probably referring to a point-to-point and point-to-multipoint connectivity from a base station to basestation architecture. 802.16e, or, the mobile side of WiMax is the ultimate end user standard not yet finalized (e.t.a. 2007). This standard has much less range - typically 3 miles or less for portable and mobile users. How does this footprint differ from cellular broandband? Differing modulation schemes, power usage, frequencies, etc is a start, but the underlying advantages of this technolgy versus cellular broadband are still untested and definitely a long way to go before they become implemented. It's hard to say if this technology will still provide us with a competitive market over the growing cellular broadband market.
We have to admit that we're in the Dark Ages of information sharing.
In the U.S., a ton of bandwidth is wasted (regulated) to antiquated technology. OTA analog and/i> digital television frequencies are two decades outdated. Lower "open" frequencies (old cordless phones, etc) are underutilized.
Information is like a river at a dam ready to break. Once we free up the limitations on frequencies, we'll see so many wireless forms of communication that publicly paid WiFi will be too expensive to compete.
In my town and the 3 neighboring towns we have 2 free WiFi providers (who also sell higher speed connections): Jimmy Wireless and Db3. They want to provide MORE free towers in more cities. Guess who prevents that? Government.
If tiny companies such as these were allowed more frequencies and fewer regulations, we'd see 5MB/1MB connections for $9/month. Maybe as low as $50/year for 2MB/512KB.
In ten years, every form of media we've seen from 1920 to 2004 will be dead. Government gave those media forms privilege, the Internet choices of millions will go around the privileged few.
You want it free? End the taxing authorities' strangehold. You want it fast? Get rid of OTA TV and radio. You want it now? Vote out any local politician who mentions any form of media.
Here's why every law and regulation and tax should have a 5 year sunset.
even with wired up environment...cooltechzone is zillions of miles away...forget wifi
...and I am its enemy.
I saw another comment saying this particular site was down prior to slashdot hitting it, but still.
It should be noted that these claims, especially that such distances can be achieved without line of sight, represent, at best, a theoretical maximum under ideal circumstances
Line of sight is ALWAYS going to be required in that frequency spectrum, unless you are very close or at very high power levels.
..don't panic
would mean an exponential expansion in the number of people within range at any one time.
Does this increase in range come alongside an increase in the number of users you can support with one basestation?
It doesn't matter if you can reach the basestation from one or fifty miles away if you can't get on the thing because it only supports 16 people at once.
This is called extending your reach farther than your grasp.
The article itself is an example of that - thousands of people trying to access this article results in mostly nobody getting to it.
I think to support even a moderately populated town, you're going to want more than 1 of these every 15 miles - the bottleneck isn't the range, it's going to be 15 miles of people trying to use one connection.
It'll only take one zombie bot, one spammer, or one overzealous downloader to ruin it for everybody, unless you start limiting people to a tiny fraction of the bandwidth - and then you're back at dialup speeds.
The Windows Vista review article was on the same website.
/. articles, same website, same day.
Two
No wonder the server flunked. Heh.
How much of a swine do you have to be to take a site down with a Slashdotting in the morning... ...and then hit them again in the afternoon?
These guys say something about your mother, Taco?
I hate it when people say things like "The Future of _____". It makes my homemade time machine completely useless. =(
How does this footprint differ from cellular broandband?
Who the hell cares?
Cellular broadband is under the thumb of cellphone companies. If you think that's not a deal-killer for any hope of sane pricing right there, you must work for a cellphone company -- in their sales department. Nobody else would possibly be willing to shut down their critical facilities to that degree.
the growing cellular broadband market
The what?
In the past my local phone calls were "free" by paying a monthly fee for service to connect my device (a phone) to the network (the telco switched network)
Today my long distance calls are "free" by paying a monthly fee to connect my radio device (labeled a cel-phone) to a wireless network of similar phones
Tomorrow my voice and data transmissions will be "free" by paying a monthly fee to connect my radio device (now labeled a computer or WiWhatever device) to a wireless network of similar devices.
Ah, but some will posit MUNICIPAL WiFi will make it "free"... Sorry, "Free" as in roads is still not "free as in beer". I will pay TaxMan then instead of the local TelCo or the regional ISP/CableCo or the national CelPhone provider.
Why, oh why, didn't I take the Blue Pill?
50W at microwave frequencies sitting on your lap sounds like a bad idea. 300W boils water in under 6 minutes when contained in a microwave oven. I'm not springing for this upgrade...
When thinking about what WiMax will offer us, I am not sure what all the advantages will be. Obviously, the current Wireless network ISPs will be able to support a much larger area, making them a lot more useful.
Beyond that, you have all the same limitations as current ISPs (i.e. I don't see this giving me a low cost 30Mbps connection.. hopefully DSL or Cable will eventually do this).
But, in relatively dense areas, I see some cool possibilities in community networks. In these, we don't worry about a big pipe to the Internet, which would be expensive. We just join a local network and share resources at high speeds.
As it is now, if i leave my upload speed reasonable on P2P apps, it quickly swamps my outbound bandwidth and all my Internet access goes to crap. P2P networks, file servers, could be a lot more useful at high LAN speeds -- and most people would be more willing to serve at high speeds when it doesn't effect their Internet connection.
Even sharing huge files, like HDTV programs, could be feasible on the local networks.
Link a few of these WiMax networks together, and you can get some huge alternate networks, where people provide useful services for their communities. Without bandwidth costs, it becomes very cheap.. I can easily set up a Linux box to dedicate to this network for a couple hundred bucks.
Wall hack
No sig for you!!
WiFi offers maybe 110Mbps in a 700m radius. WiMax offers maybe 650Mbps in 24000m radius. That's 71bps:m for WiFi vs. 0.36bps:m for WiMax . WiFi is 200x as dense as WiMax. Rural areas have much larger areas which don't account for bandwidth usage, with big users every few miles. While urban areas have much more even distribution of consumption - even stacking 3-4 layers per meter, sometimes 20-50+ layers (like urban centers like Manhattan). Real consumption shows that WiMax is better for rural areas, or long backhauls (attenuated into beams that can carry the network maybe hundreds of miles across gaps like open water). Even in rural areas, WiFi is better for the hotspots, like actual buildings or vehicles. While in urban areas, even public places like streets are very dense, with 655Mbps shared by hundreds of people every block.
So WiFi isn't exactly an "upgrade" to WiFi. It's a complementary technology. Even throttling down the power to cover only a few blocks with each WiMax AP to use its higher bandwidth is only useful as a connection "umbrella" to interconnect denser WiFi hotspots in buildings and cars. Which is also appropriate, because users in public places are usually mobile or casual, without the bandwidth demands of a stationary user. WiMax marketers are selling it as an upgrade to WiFi because WiFi is such a popular brand name, and WiMax has to sell to anyone who will buy. But we should get excited only about the WiMax features that are actually better than WiFi in the scenarios where WiFi is now the round peg in the square hole. Otherwise we'll be sorely disappointed when inappropriate WiMax applications underperform even WiFi, and we'll be stuck with the wrong solution - and the marketdroids will be stuck with our money, without which we can't buy what we actually want.
--
make install -not war
"Update looks like the site buckled. Sorry."
/. don't mirror the pages they link to? /. effect?
Then why
Why do small web servers have to suffer the
I wish tech press would discard the PR-driven myth that WiMAX is an upgrade to WiFi.
WiMAX is a different thread in the IEEE technical standards, designed to accomplish different things. WiFi's upgrade path is not from 802.11g to 802.16, but to the partly-completed 802.11n.
The 802.11n standard is designed for faster wireless LANs - which is a different market to the WiMAX wireless local loop target.
With a maximum distance of about 25 km, there should be no problem to build a large network within a city or even smaller villages. The hubs should not be owned by a company, they should be owned by people like you and me. Why pay a company for something that we can do for the cost of a hub and network card? All we need are a few access points with internet connection. Maybe cities realize the potential behind this idea and provide those access points for free. The rest will grow like poison ivy. New services will follow, such as free phone lines, conference connections with video, free information access for poor people, more porn - of course - and many other good things. If companies like COX and Verizon do not like the idea, then it is about time for us to ask why not.
most of these journalists writing about WiMAX know nothing about the technology behind it.
the same electro-magnetic waves just travel differently. if at all the cable gives you an illusion of security.
antennas are multiples of wavelength. in this case wavelength 3*10^8/100MHz = 3 meters
Checkout the article by Wired ( http://wired.com/news/wireless/0,1382,69234,00.htm l?tw=wn_tophead_3 ) where they talk about the "wireless cloud that stretches over 700 square miles of landscape so dry and desolate it could have been lifted from a cowboy tune." where "Ziari is recovering the investment through contracts with more than 30 city and county agencies, as well as big farms such as Hale's, whose onion empire supplies over two-thirds of the red onions used by the Subway sandwich chain." that has made uses with "both short-range Wi-Fi signals and a version of a related, longer-range technology known as WiMax."
z3uS -zNet- http://z3us.net/
Those of us in rural and undeveloped areas will continue to have the same problems if/when wimax actually happens. o) Customer density. Providers will set up service where they have high customer density. I could have DSL here, but Verizon can't be bothered to update the antiquated equipment in the site that serves me. They similarly can't be bothered to put a cell tower near me. o) Rural and undeveloped areas tend to have trees and hills, that will continue to be problems for wireless last-mile technologies. Wimax, like EVDO, will largely sell based on "coolness" to customers who already have myriad affordable connectivity options.
Where the damn hardware that I can buy???
So far, WiMax is like another vapour ware.
There's this really informative and useful tech-oriented site called cooltechzone.com, wo why don't we slashdot the fucking daylights out of 'em!
Earlier this week the NY Times ran a piece on the emergence of broadband over power lines (BPL) and it looks pretty promising. There are successful tests being run now in Manassas VA and in the Cincinnatti area. Essentially users will plug a sort-of power brick into an outlet, then plug an ether line into that. That procedure says to me thatit'll exhibit many of the same operational characteristics as broadband over cable, so we'd not have the signal flakiness and security issues associated with WiMAX. Indeed, we're starting a new dorm/academic facility on my campus soon and I'm hoping to see BPL used at least locally to facilitate near-ubiquitous connectivity.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks