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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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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).
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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
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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?
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.
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.
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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?
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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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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.
"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.
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Here's a nice link for you...you'll need to have GreaseMonkey installed for it. Won't do you much good in this particular instance, but might help in the future.
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~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
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
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.
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.
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