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Is There Too Much Enthusiasm Over Wireless?
lukOh asks: "in the US, 802.11b/g (2.4Ghz) devices use an
83Mhz-wide frequency range; in-use channels spanning 22Mhz and centered on one of 11 5Mhz steps (badly named as "channels"). This means there should be no more that 3 networks in close proximity, 5 'channels' far from each other, to avoid harmful interference. Now, in the middle of the mixed area where I am, the number of usable WLANs (SNR>20dBm) has gone from 10 to an unworkable number of 20, in just one month. Has the community/the market overestimated the practicality of wireless networks? Are we generally relying too much on such a young, IMHO immature technology made on 'startups hope' and broken firmwares? How can this mess possibly be handled in a working environment, especially the moment your boss asks you to give him access to 'the wireless'?"
"Access points can be easily detected, but the same isn't always true for every single client (or Bluetooth device) searching or using a network. Bluetooth itself employs the same 2.4Ghz range with 1Mhz-wide channels and much less power. To avoid interference a device jumps channel-to-channel, when the currently selected one is busy.
Most WLANs are managed by less-than-perfect SOHO access points. Connecting to an AP in such an environment is a gamble (even from 1ft away), especially when: WPA/WPA2 must be used; 802.11g stability is a dream; anywhere up to 7 networks are on the same 'channel' (1 and 11, being the most used, are standard on many devices); and now 'channel wars' are very common (i.e. 2 or more users concurrently hunting to set a free channel for their network, making the entire range unusable for hours)."
Most WLANs are managed by less-than-perfect SOHO access points. Connecting to an AP in such an environment is a gamble (even from 1ft away), especially when: WPA/WPA2 must be used; 802.11g stability is a dream; anywhere up to 7 networks are on the same 'channel' (1 and 11, being the most used, are standard on many devices); and now 'channel wars' are very common (i.e. 2 or more users concurrently hunting to set a free channel for their network, making the entire range unusable for hours)."
No one else is using it.
everything will be wireless one day
.kyle
ALL WIRES are a pain. Wireless will always dominate where possible to use. Just wait until wireless power is available...
"Are we generally relying too much on such a young, IMHO immature technology made on 'startups hope' and broken firmwares? "
We're relying too much on an unregulated spectrum.
The extention of the 802.11b standard into 802.11g is a pain the arse for exactly this reason. All access-points should be limited to work on only channels 1,6 or 11, and rate limited so that anything too far away simply drops off, rather than throttling.
802.11a has a much better frequency spacing (8 non-overlapping channels in most juridstiction, 4 in the others), but many countries won't let you use it outside. The penetrating power at 5GHz is also less than at 2.4GHz.
Has wireless been overhyped? Hell yeah, but all we are seeing is the same problem that we all had when everybody went out and bought a 900Mhz cordless phone.
We need to either compress the channel bandwidth (OFDM with few channels around the center frequency), which would give less bandwidth per channel, extend the number of non-overlapping channels available. Jacking up the frequency would give better overall throughput and less channel conflict at the cost of range.
Norman Cook's Ode to Sl
If the access is already there, why cause problems by trying to put up another access point? Use theirs, jam theirs until they give up, or share.
Wireless technology is great.... when you absolutely need it. Take the Conference Room scenario, whats wrong with a high port density switch under the table, accessible via a central panel? You end up with a 'spiderweb' of Cat5 cables, but with wireless, you still end up with all the power cables.
Yes, its useful to avoid snaking a cable from your desk to your bed in your dorm room, but is it a necessity?
Or have consumers bought into the "I need my data everywhere" ideal promised by the wireless people (Centrino! Get it, you'll be a hipster Blue Man Group Guy) and the constant bombardment of high speed wireless access ads from the phone company (Verizon)?
Back in my day, we had vt100 and 9600 baud, and we ran long serial cables or keyboard extension cables if you needed to be able to compute while wandering around your dorm room or a lab. How much real progress has been made with the WWW and 802.11 ?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
I have to troubleshoot a network timeout problem that doesn't happen in wired locations I support, but the wireless one times out when a certain application isn't used for about 10 minutes.
And the wireless printer there suddenly decided forget how to get an IP address from the wireless router.
It's not a happy time in Wirelessville.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
If your device uses batteries then wireless makes more sense. If it's something that you don't ever want to replace batteries for, then you have to plug it in. At that point, you may as well plug it into the non-wireless network.
There are three usable channels. A good engineer will put up a tower with three 120-degree antennas, and put one channel on each side. On alternating towers, arrange the overlap so you are always covering the same zone with the same channel. Ideally you create three overlapping lobes.
Under this scheme, there can be three service providers in an area, and they have to cooperate to avoid interference. The fourth provider is SOL and is on a short train to bankruptcy.
Here is the beauty of wi-fi through; it is effectively first-come, first-serve. If your system worked before, and interference from the new guy makes it stop working, you can force them off the airwaves.
Even more beautiful, once you are incorporated, and your corporation owns this prior claim, you in effect have a sellable asset. In a densely developed area, this could be a valuable asset.
It isn't foolproof though. Unfortunately, although your prior claim to those frequencies overrides any newcomer who wants to use wi-fi, there are other uses that can take priority over wi-fi altogether.
P.S. - If you want to be a complete jerk, you lay out your initial towers so every cell is covered by three lobes, one of each channel. Then there are no channels left for your competition. I bet the FCC would make you rearrange your lobes before forcing the other guy off the air, though.
Wireless is a tool and can be great when applied appropriately. It is not the answer to everything as some would like to think.
I work for a college and once or twice a year someone brings forward the idea of a mobile cart of laptops for a roaming classroom. All laptops using wireless networking.
It sounds great until you find out they want to 30 students doing graphics or medical imaging at the same time. Of course we mention that it may not perform up to their expectations and that they should do some testing. They never follow through with the testing.
I'll say it again. Wireless is a tool and can be great when applied appropriately.
Keep the Classic Slashdot.
One Solution that /nerds seem to find suitable is to login to whatever access points are chocking your channels and change their settings.
I know, its not exactly ethical, it is legally dubious, etc.
But, since most people rarely change the default admin password, you can't argue with the results from switching people off your channel, or reducing the broadcast power of their WAP.
Mostly though, the issue is that WAPs aren't 'intelligent.' They aren't spread-spectrum, they can't automaticall channel hop because they can't predict how good/bad your reception will be... There's a whole host of technical challenges to making them play nicely together.
Here's a super nerdy pdf with equations, pics representing signal intensity/overlap. If it doesn't answer your questions in a highly technical matter, I don't know what will.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
I imagine we'll wind up with some sort of consolidation. We'll have something similar to phone companies with wireless. A regulated monopoly actually seems the most efficient here. I'd say the best example is radio stations. They are regulated so that they don't interfere with each other. We'll probably have wireless "markets" where different companies work. And at least here two or three could co-exist in some markets. And since competition among wireless providers means an area is more attractive to businesses, then gov't will maybe subsidize tower-building?
And for a good reason, it is so cool to be able to work from anywhere. When I was in college. We had alot of tables with network connections. But with so much student they were always taken. We could only work at places that had no plugs.
So the hotspot were my savior. Now when I work in my office, I don't need to mess with cable anymore(beside AC or mouse). I would never get back to the "old" way now.
One day the wireless turned out not to work very well. We didn't understand it at first. Cause it was working so well for so long. We discovered that 2 other hotspot has been install near our own, so they were 4 wifi network near each other.
They was somekind of interference. We changed channel to an unused one instead of using our default channel 6. It helped, but the article is right. They should have tough of the hype. They could prevented this. Now it will get worst. And the only solution is upgrade to a newer better standard...
But for now, we moved to a new business adress, and we are the only one using wifi. Joy to my world.
It's funny how I make sense to others and not myself...
Others have described this as "The Tragedy of the Commons." Have a stretch of pasture where anyone can graze their cattle for free, and it'll soon be overgrazed. Have a stretch of the spectrum that anyone can freely use, and it'll become overused, so much so that no one gets any benefit.
I saw that in a town I visited where the water was unmetered. A local told me that at first it seemed a good idea. Water was so cheap and abundant, why go to the cost of metering and billing by usage? But unmetered led to waste and waste led to a search for new sources that turned out to be expensive. The result was that everyone, whether they wasted or not, had to paid sky-high water bills.
I hate to sound like a scold, but we need to make like good little hobbits and not trash our Technological Shire. We are going to have to discipline ourselves not to waste what's free. If wired can do the job with a trifling more effort (and probably less cost), we need use wire. Reserve wireless where it's necessary or particularly handy.
--Mike Perry, Untangling Tolkien
2. 802.11a does not use the same frequencies as b and g, and has more spectrum. Unfortunately, the wireless manufacturers aren't promoting it, but even if the complaint above - that there are only three distinct bands and therefore you can't have more than three networks in one place - was actually true, it is an actual solution.
3. The complaint noted by the article is false. While it is true that there are only three distinct, non-overlapping, slices of spectrum allocated for 802.11b and g, you can have more than one network using the same slice of spectrum, at the cost of efficiency and speed. It is not the case that having a network on, say, bands 1-4 suddenly means that no other networks can use that spectrum, either theoretically or practically. The more networks run on those bands, the poorer performance will be, that's all. In reality, the chances of the performance decrease being so bad that it actually makes more of a difference than your DSL's bandwidth is relatively low, especially in the US where 1.5Mbps is considered a really good connection.
So, to recap. Wireless works. It could be more efficient, but as sold, currently, it's more than up to the task. The proof of the pudding is that people are actually going out there and setting up their own wireless networks, and keeping them. We're not facing any real problems yet.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
So I'd say . . . yes.
KFG
I just don't understand the whole craze over wireless. The only place it really makes sense is in public places like airports, cafes, etc, where there might be people with laptops. It also makes sense in homes / apartments where it is too hard / costs too much / is impractical to run wire. Buf if your router is sitting next to your computer there is no reason to go wireless. I've got a house with 4 rooms separated by enough distance that running wire through the walls would be too much work. So I've got the router in one room and the other three are connected through HPNA (phoneline networking). Yes, we use HPNA and it works just fine. The bandwidth and speed available on HPNA is more than enough to accomodate our DSL. However, the tranfer speeds between computers are painfully slow compared to Cat5. We don't really transfer stuff to each other so it's not really a problem. It doesn't interfere with the DSL or phone line either (DSL, phone, and HPNA all on the same physical line). For some reason HPNA never really took off but it is perfect for sharing DSL / cable in a home / apartment.
All the appliances in your home are battery powered? I bet she puts up with cords for a variety of things, even the television. Of course, most of those are hidden down the edge of the walls and behind the furniture, etc so I see your (hers) point but only somewhat.
;)
It's not the wires that are a problem, it's the builders philosphy of where to put outlets and what to have "outletted".
The solution is just modern home design with some better plug-age in the normal areas. The problem is, it is only in the last few years that ethernet and coax cabling to every room has become sort of common in new residential construction. Most places it is somewhat doable as a retrofit, others it is not or exceedingly difficult. Another problem is the aversion people have to floor as opposed to wall outlets, because it forces a somewhat fixed furniture location. A dictatorship like an office can get away with it, but most homeowners wouldn't want it unless it was camoflauged somewhat or they could be content with their initial furniture layout and add in the ethernet/cable outlets where they fit the best. Yes, work, but maybe worthwhile work.
And besides, it's always nice to have an excuse to get out the sawzall!
It's been around for years but hardly anyone uses it. Every power outlet is a network connection and it's secure because the signal can't get past the electricity meter. Sure it might not be quite as convenient as wireless but is more convenient than regular wired networks and has about the same level of security.
Seems to me that public band wireless networks are often set up as a result of poor planing.
.. -> Convergence? :)
The only solution is smaller networks, but then there will be more (wired) APs of course-> easier to get a wire ->
After a year of wireless I have just finished moving back to a wired home network. In retrospect it seems like a loony idea: why replace a reliable wired network with a whole bunch of expensive equipment that provided less performance with far less reliability?
Using your laptop on the couch or on the deck has great novelty value, but is useless from a work or ergonomic perspective. Throw in interference, inevitable drop outs, and the fact that real world performance is no where near the '54Mbs' marked on the box and it all adds up to an unappealing package in the home.
if it weren't for a pair of legitimate concerns that all the home users in a neighbourhood have like:
- ISPs putting ridiculously low monthly bandwidth limits on users - like mine, 10Gb/month down... If I download one Mandriva install DVD, that just about uses it up! Add in that Finnish Star Trek spoof, and I'll probably be getting a phone call saying I'm downloading too much.
- ease of setting up a network where your LAN is private, but the wireless router will allow other LANs to be set up... then people could reasonably share a single access point.
When I set up my network 2 years ago, there were 2 other detectable wireless networks. Now there's 10; 1 is open.
If I could be made to feel that my home network is reasonably secure (with wireless), and I didn't have to worry about download limits, then mine would be a public access point.
When I park somewhere to borrow Internet access, more often than not, the majority of WAPs are Linksys on channel 6. If it's a spot I might use again, sometimes I'll log in (l:admin p:password) and sort out the mess, putting some of the APs on 1 and 11.
I believe WAP manufacturers (the big three especially) have a responsibility to at least default each unit to a random channel (1, 6, or 11). Even better, have the WAP scan for and use the least cluttered channel on power-up.
Thank you, Edward Snowden.
"Arguments from authority are worthless." —Carl Sagan
A stealthy little device that does nothing but send white noise on the common WLAN frequencies, with a strong amp. At 30$ (and way lower production cost), with basic programmability and hidden in something like a distribution box, it is the perfect gift to leave for your ex-employer. Although of course, it is going to be marketed as strictly just protection from privacy lawsuits.
I'm not making them, I'm just saying someone is bound to.
I've used wireless a few times, on different machines, different networks and different platforms, with different wireless adapters connecting to different hubs. In no case has it ever worked right the first time. The proprietary Windows driver program (with cutesy nonstandard user interface that looks like it was carved out of a 1970s station wagon) will display hubs, but simply not connect to one, and not provide an explanation or any way to get an explanation. If it does eventually decide to work, it will not be for any conceivable reason.
Remember this joke? "SCSI is *not* magic. There are *fundamental* *technical* *reasons* why you have to sacrifice a young goat to your SCSI chain every now and then." Yeah, wireless ethernet is now like that for me. I am utterly unimpressed with the technology. What good is all this shiny if it's so unreliable as to be useless?
I'll care about wireless when it's easier to use than running a bunch of Cat5.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
There are 22 wireless networks around me, and a third of them have no protection at all, another 50% have WEP, and the rest have WPA. If the protected networks could turn down their broadcast strength it would help others. Also, half of the "open" networks use the default SSID and channel.
This has been a problem with most systems based on Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum, specifically those with overlapping channels in the 2.4 Ghz band.
Note that the reason the band is supposedly 11 channels (14 are defined, and the number of channels you can use in various countries are restricted, etc etc) dates back to the original 802.11 standard, which had a maximum throughput of 2 Mbps, and a much smaller channel width. With a much smaller channel width, these channels really were non-overlapping. But as the speed goes up, the "spread" of the transmission covers other channels each side of the "main" channel.
The original 802.11 standard however not only covered Direct Sequence stuff, but Frequency Hopping Spread Spectrum devices. You can't talk to FHSS stuff with DSSS stuff, and vice versa, which is a compatibility pain. A lot of FHSS devices are used in warehouses and the like, as FHSS is fairly immune to noise, but had a much lower limit on it's speed (2 Mbps or slightly more if you go vendor specific). Also, in the early days of wireless, FHSS stuff cost a lot more to produce. FHSS uses a hopping set (usually between 1 and 3) and a hopping sequence (usually between 1 and 26) to determine what channels it will use, and in what order. This allows a lot of combinations that try to avoid each other, reducing interference. It's also a lot harder to sniff out a FHSS network, and many of the devices out there don't support monitoring of any sort (ala what programs like kismet rely on), as most stuff is actually done in hardware. That's not to say it's not possible though, and many FHSS networks have very poor security (as they haven't gone further than WEP with 128 bit keys).
It should be noted that the Bluetooth standard uses an FHSS implementation, so the costs have come down quite a bit, though Bluetooth is also a fair bit slower, which makes it cheaper to produce.
a wireless technology called "L2R" solved all these problems, over 5 years ago.
You could have over 85,000 wireless devices in a 500 meter radius.
oh and it would work with 802.11b hardware very nicely.
Let's see you do that with any othr technology. come on.
Yep, 5 years later and no one has even come close to L2R...
5 years from now, in the future, a full 10 years after L2R was created, and I bet there
STILL wont be any technology that's even close.
it's beyond pathetic, its now just sad that this isn't being used.
sigh... maybe some day. until then, L2R will just be a dream for the masses...
Part of the problem is in the 802.1x standards. As they are currently defined they do not have support for decent radio resource management techniques. I agree that it is an open spectrum but it is almost equal to or larger than the spectrum available some standards in 3G wireless and hence are able to support more data rate per bandwidth available in a pico cell environment.
There are many startup companies that are currently developing RRM solutions for 802.1x that sit inside the base station and interact with other base stations to enable better resource management. But these solutions do not work in situations the post describes, as these solutions are proprietary.
Based on what I know standards are currently being developed to add RRM into the standards and once that is done and available in products we can see some improvement.
But, it is important to keep in mind the technology still has a ways to go. As more people start using wireless it becomes pretty obvious that improving the infastructure of wireless networks really is the next big step. Where wireless really is incredibly useful is:
1) In homes where people own a laptop
2) In homes/businesses where running cat from one end of the building to the other would be cost prohibitive or a plain old pain in the butt.
3) Any form of mobile technology(gaming units, phones, mp3 players, etc).
4) And long term: once long range wireless technology begins to improve/be implemented, it will be a great last mile and/or cost effective solution to getting the internet into people's homes with little latency.
In my case I use it in my home to avoid the cat cable running nightmare. My roommate has one machine hooked directly into the router and I have my two computers on the other end of the house networked by wire then connected to the router wirelessly. I also use the wireless network for my Nintendo DS and PSP.
Do people get a bit too crazy over wireless networks? Yeah a bit, but really it is an incredibly useful technology that just needs to improve in certain areas to accomodate what is obviously a growing demand.
You are who you are, let no one tell you different. But, never close your mind to a new point of view.
From what I hear, Intel is planning to introduce WiMAX any day now. One of the big changes is that it will use licensed spectrum in some modes. Hopefully mortal people will be able to purchase a license. If that's the case we'll be able to have some recourse if someone causes our carrier to noise ratio (C/N) to drop to an unacceptable level. 2.4GHz is mostly unlicensed space, so there's not much you can do about it.
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
Slashdot has been filled to the top with slobbering wireless fanboys for years and years. This is the very first article I've seen where the poster isn't gushing all over the ISM band and how they'll put a brazillian bits/second through it from over the horizon.
I did see quite a few theoretical posts - ie there are three channels, a good engineer will use three 120 degree sectors. That is better, but they go on to say the next ISP that comes along is SOL. Not the case - they just elbow there way in, and people keep loving up the ISM band until it turns into packet bukkake - 100% utilization, 0% throughput.
Anyone who seriously wants to deploy that stuff should go google for "n9zia wireless" and read the Green Bay packet crazies ideas, which is where I learned half of what I know. The other half came from hard experience.
There will, of course, be two dozen fanboys all set to reply to this. You need to ask yourself the following questions:
Ever climb a tower?
Ever made a 21.7 mile shot using 802.11b?
Ever operated a wireless ISP in a metro area?
Ever been invited to speak at WispCon?
If you're not qualified, please shoot your mouth off on some other topic. Really. This article is a step in the right direction for Slashdot - away from wireless delusions of grandeur and towards a bit of realism.
I am very easy to get along with, but I don't have time to waste being nice to people who are being stupid. -Theo
So while I agree that technically there can be difficulties with wireless, as of yet (knock on wood) I have not had any troubles... It just works, you fire up the WAP, you change the password and setup your WPA, you fire up your laptop, you put the same info in there, it makes a connection and everything is peachy.
Now I bring up the point that I live in a wireless dense apartment complex. I believe the last time I counted, I found well over 15 different WAPs in the area with about half wide open ("linksys" is listed multiple times), Linux currently tells me that I have 119% reception, and if I move out of this room and into our bedroom on the otherside of the apartment, it may drop to 95% on a bad day. I still get full speed, I never notice any glitches and life is still peachy.
I used to travel A LOT, like 60-70% of the time during the year. I've been to wireless enabled hotel after hotel. Again, I haven't had any issues (baring one time when the most powerful WAP in the hotel had a routing issue so anytime I connected to that one I could't get to the net, so I had to sit by the door to pickup a different one). I got good bandwidth (as good as can be expected from free hotel wireless) and good reception.
Now also keep in mind, I didn't spend a lot on this setup. I have a netgear router I got for 20 bucks at Best Buy, and a Netgear WG511 PCMCIA card I got for 25 on sale at best buy when I was on site in california. No MIMO or anything.
I again, agree that wireless may be problematic in the future, and I think we (manufacturers and users/admins) need to think through the potential issues that we'll no doubt come to. However, we all have to realize that as long as something works so nicely and is still thought of as "hip" (and believe me, when new laptops get bigger batteries, soak up less power and last longer and longer wireless just gets more and more "hip"), everyone will continue to want it. And while some of us know how to crimp cables and run wires through our houses, John Q. Public and Jane Doe don't and don't care to learn if they can drop $20 bucks and have it all work.
I for one will continue to enjoy my problem and teather free life style.
-=JML=-
But his Etch-A-Sketch is already wireless?
If they actually have a computer, simply connect his computer to the wireless router via CAT-5.
Okay, it's sorta' like that. I used to have an economics teacher that always used to say, "If socialism worked, I'd be a socialist, but it doesn't, so I'm a Capitolist." He said that if communism and socialism worked (which would only be possible with leaders who truely did everything in the best interest to the people), then people would have pretty good lives, but people with power get corrupt, and so those societies don't work. So we turn to the more Laze Fare (I know, I misspelled it) ideas because they at least work better.
Anyway, if we didn't have the constant pessimism that regulators (of any technology) would abuse and misuse their powers, then we could get all of the frequencies regulated and probably be just fine. But, since various regulation groups tend to be bent one way or another due to various large interested companies, the unregulated seems like the best choice to us...
For certain applications, regulated sounds fine. In others, like in private homes, it'd be horrible. My solution: offer companies that are willing to pay extra the ability to use regulated frequencies to do their networking, and let the rest of us have at it in the unreg spectrum.
GentryDigital.com - A Digital Photography Education
My school has wireless everywhere on campus, every class, every hall, even the pub and outside. There are hundreds of students connecting, since the school provides a laptop to all students that need it for their programs, IT or animation/film. I get about 1-2 MB/s downloads on good connections.
There is no problems, if the network is constructed properly, and u do it right. I have never had a problem with the wireless at my school, so i dont see why it would be any more complicated to impliment in a office enviroment.
At home, i do use cat-5, as i prefer the security it gives, and the speeds. Once the cables are there, its alot more stable and simple the wireless.
-EL
-EL
I am not particularly knowledgable about wireless technology, but I don't expect this to be a longterm problem. Yes everyone is going wireless (and this trend is not going to change... heck, people would buy into wireless power supply if it was technically feasable). And yes, the spectrum is getting more and more crowded, but this is mainly because the technology is so new and expanding so quickly that it is not well manage. If you think about it the whole elec.-magn. spectrum is not used efficiently. We have wireless house phones, WLAN, television, radio stations, cellphone, etc. At some point we will have to review all of this and realise that they are all these technologies are only about exchanging data. With the consolidation of all these technologies (it will take quite a few years (10?), especially given that the RIAA and MPAA are scared shitless at the idea that their "property" become too easily accessible) , we will have to rethink how we use wireless technology. Most likely we will have to define one protocol that works over a very broad spectrum that would allow for many accessible channels of two way communication. Obviously some part of the spectrum will have to be restricted for security purposes (I am thinking VHF radios), but clearly there is too much overlapping of technologies doing pretty much the same thing. I know radio and tv are different, but what is the point if you can find the same content on internet? Anyway, I am just thinking that the problem we are experiencing now has more to do with getting adjusted to "hot" technology than with a fundamental longterm problem. anyone wants 2 cents?
I've been using wireless in the form of packet radio for almost 15 years and using aironet gear (the guys cisco bought) in production since 1998. While it's true that there are a lot of networks in the air most of them continue to function despite the interference. Isn't that strange??? no it's not ... all you need is a good enough piece of hardware to pick the sound from the noise. Perhaps more importantly I am writing this over a 5 meg full duplex wireless connection that gets fast internet to me from 13.2 miles away and hasn't dropped a packet in three years!!!
The security problems of wireless, combined with its pathetic bandwidth, are going to doom it to being a permanent niche technology.
Once broadband over power lines becomes a little more widespread, PC companies will start to build their network interface into the power cable on both desktops and laptops. When you plug into the wall, you'll be online.
And as we all know, in the mass market, simplicity trumps everything.
Add to the technical disadvantages the scandals that will result when inevitably a few large companies suffer major financial setbacks from having their sensitive data picked up out of the wireless spectrum by war-driving corporate spies, wireless will be relegated to the dustheap of history. The hoola-hoop of network technology.
"Sic Semper Path of Least Resistance"
This is the reason our office went wireless-less last week.
Not to mention phones. Cordless phones rely on two sources to work and of course they tend to die.
What really needs to be invented is untangleable wires.
If you would prefer a well engineered, well thought-out solution with central channel allocation, with a central authority who will take care of any resource disputes, nobody is stopping you from signing up with Verizon or T-Mobile and their wonderful data $ervice$. I will be laughing at you from my multi-MB/s wireless LAN.
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
I would say that we need smarter users but that will not happen, so we need smarter hardware, there is 4 ap behind my house called "default" on ch6 all with default passwords and settings. If on install the ap could find a empty channel then use that or sync as to share a channel airtime. but nothing good old copper of uptime. but i would like to see a few more then just 3 usable 2.4ghz channels
..but fuck regulation.
Wireless works because there is NO regulation. I've been a ham radio operator for 15 years. It doesn't get any more regulated than that. Know where that hobby is?
Cellular is regulated. How much per kB, that's 1024 bytes, to tranfer IP packets?
Regulation would spell instant death for wireless. We don't NEED regulation in those bands. That's the WHOLE POINT OF THE 2.4GHZ BAND!
Enough already. I don't want to pay a liscence fee to the government to use my wireless hub.
..don't panic
I love my wireless devices, but they are starting to become a royal pain. RF interference is starting to annoy me, and it gets worse every year.
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
If there are 20 networks in range of you, why aren't they all doing the mesh thing to maximize bandwidth and get some redundancy too? This is just like with OSS - everybody wants to "homestead the frontier" instead of realizing that it's not a frontier anymore, and cooperate with what already exists. And those who are smart enough to do so want to secure the hell out of their networks too, not share with the neighbors at all. Just human nature, I guess.
The lack of organization is really inefficient. I'm surprised there aren't more organized free community networks nowadays; I really thought that was going to happen more, and that the big corporate empires wouldn't be as efficient about covering large areas with hotspots and then charging big fees to use them. A lot of hams have some sense of duty to use their skills for community service, but a lot of wifi hackers don't, apparently.
The law firm I work for recently moved to a new location, and we setup our wireless as we had it in the old location, and we cannot get a reliable signal due to interference from 7 other networks near our building, unless we are within 30 feet of the WAP's, on BOTH floors we manage. We had to basically scrap 802.11g, we tried various methods of automatic to forced channel selection, with no luck. What happens is we just see drops of the wireless after anywhere between 30 seconds and 10 minutes, and it takes another 15-60 seconds to reconnect. This is with a very good signal strength, also.
Wireless in my apartment is hopeless. There are only a couple of networks but even before there were any others my wireless wouldn't even work in some rooms. And it drops so many packets that it's unusable for anything but light webpage browsing. Doing anything that requires a constant connection fails horribly. I had to go back to a wired which obviously works fine.
-- You're too stupid to be an atheist.
It's not often that one witnesses such pretentious flamebait from such a low UID. Congradulations, sir. Here's your asshat.
On a more serious note: One does not need to be a wireless engineer to offer an opinion, particularly within such a community as this. You've obviously been here longer than I, and as such I can understand your pain. However, given your level of experience, you should be one of the people who is least likely to spout their keyboards off in such a gout of "tactile diarrhea".
Advice for the future: Think of yourself like one of the parents of /. You need to set an example for the young'ns. It is unbecoming to bully others by proclaiming the renown of your "metaphorical majesty"... It does, however, demonstrate that you are just a big cock.
They should invent a 'dumb neighbour aggregator' application which combines the bandwidth of all the unsecured wireless networks in the immediate area and provides you with a single big pipe to play with. I think there was some MS 'virtual' wireless adaptor thing, maybe that could do it.
Not that I condone that kind of activity. Nope, not in any way shape or form...
Task Mangler
Quite a few good suggestions here regarding community effort and sharing. But as much as we want, it is just not feasible in the current state of affairs.
1. Cable companies cap the damn modem.
2. How many of us leave torrents running 24/7?
3. RIAA/MPAA will be jolly pissed at not being able to pinpoint their next victims behind all the NAT
Really, community regulation is not really an easy task. Yes we may be friendlier, but how many non-geeks out there actually care much that they are eating up bandwidth with their torrents and file servers? Once people start abusing, we will have to play Survival! The outcast will just set up their own network and everything degrades back to the old ways.
Anyhow, I blame the freaking ISPs. Over here, they play santa 365/24/7, giving away linksys routers with a new sign-up.
Conversation:
X: hey dude, my connection is slow. I think someone's stealing my bandwidth. You know how I can secure it?
Me: yeah, go to your router page and enable WPA. It's dead easy.
X: but I can't login!
Me: (without much thinking needed) try linksys/admin.
X: I think someone changed it!
Me: press the reset switch for 10 seconds. You will lose some settings though.
X: Oh damn, that sucks. I'll have to type in my adapter's MAC again.
Firstly, tech support stinks. Secondly, it's tough helping people who doesn't listen. Thirdly, I have no idea how his password can get changed if he blocked access with MAC address. Lastly, screw those people giving away wireless routers with every big mac meal.
Ok, I'm all ready for do some covert community work by changing channels for a start.
Wireless is overrated. 30 meters ethernet cables rules!
You just got troll'd!
Is There Too Much Enthusiasm Over Wireless?
There's not enough enthusiasm for wireless!
Wireless could allow consumers to free themselves from the regional telecom monopolies' grasp and transform internet access from a monthly pay-service into a single expense commodity market. That's a tremendous gain for consumers as commodity markets are much more competitive and offer far better flexibility of choice. It will be a wonderful day when wireless allows us to abandon the Bells and the Alltels that are blocking the development of better telecom and broadband.
Which world would you rather live in?
A) Paying $45 a month for 1.5mbps down / 128 mbps up
B) Paying $90 every two years(wireless hub upgrade) for 10mbps down / 10mpbs up
I can't think of a better advancement in communications than having legions of consumer owned WAPs create a freely useable broadband mesh.
The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky
Obviously you use your computer differently than I do.
I have a laptop. 75% of the time, it sits on the desk, right next to the router. But it's that other 25% of the time that made my $30 wireless router worth it. Being able to yank the power plug and usb hub, and pull the laptop onto the couch while watching tv. Or reading slashdot, deciding I want to take a dump, and hauling the computer onto the pot. Or when the wife has company over, so I want to go take the computer and hide in the other room.
Why mess with all the hassle of setting up HPNA, or running wires, when you could just buy a $30 router and it works ANYWHERE in the apartment, and you are free to move around?
Sure, I'll be the first to admit that there are problems with wireless, just like everyone else is saying. Speed is slower, and overcrowding, yeah yeah. But I don't think it's overhyped -- I use it because it's cheap and convenient. That's not hype, it's quality. And if the high quality means that the rest of the non-geek world catches on and wants to use it, well, so be it. Sure, it could have the side-effect of lowering the quality slightly for me, but that doesn't mean that there's too much enthusiasm. It means the world has caught on to something useful.
That's wrong for "11 Mb/Sec", which is the commonly-advertised maximum (and default, usually) rate, although the RF (OSI layer 1, transport) 'overhead' reduces that to 6-7 Mbps of "meat" in 802.11b. 1, 6 and 11 are the 3 unblocking channels.
A technical explanation in this forum would likely be unproductive, since a discussion of chipping (CCP) and modulation schemes would probably be meaningless to most folks here (imho?). Reply if you disagree ;).
I operate one neighborhood network and I've seen all sort of problems with 2.4 GHz overcrowding, but still there is no need for regulation as the market will reglate it itself.
The 2.4 GHz stuff will eventually pushed to indoor use and 5 GHz will be used for outdoor (long link) communications.
Everyone is pushing wireless lately, God knows why as it's crap for anything other than basic web surfing.
Have you ever tried to even copy a CD ISO over the LAN via wireless? Got a few hours?
108Mbps my arse.
And PCI wireless cards are even more pointless - what's wrong with Ethernet? Wires are not that hard to lay, and a switch is cheaper than an AP. I bought a GbE switch for 40ukp the other day.
And with everyone on wireless, it will eventually kill itself off as there's no frequencies left.
#include <sig.h>
Hi. Just a friendly, offtopic note:
You might want to use "want" in place of "wan't". As an example, "can't" is short for "can not" and "won't" is short for "will not", but want is a word in its own right.
Remember, I'm not trying to bash you, just letting you improve your english.
"Good news, everyone!"
I'm glad to hear that someone else feels the same way I do. I have to set up wireless networks in environments for people all the time where they tell me that they, "need it to be 100% stable." This is a pipe dream these days with the way wireless networking devices are being made. Almost everything out their is utter crap unless it costs over $1k. I have tried almost everything and it all crashes and has interference problems. I wish that there was some piece of wireless equipement that you could just set up and never have to worry about it crashing. Just plug it in and come back to take it down in 2 years when it's time to upgrade to the newer/faster technology
I've tried a lot of the stuff that is out there from the Linksys WRT54GS running DD-WRT, OpenWRT, HyperWRT, Sveasoft, OEM, etc..., to a Netgear WG302, to the Cisco wireless-B AP's. It all crashes! Now this isn't to say that I don't absolutely love wireless and wish that the technology was more mature; I use wireless everyday and live with it by my side, but my clients that I work for as an IT consultant just need to learn to expect more out of what technology has to offer
--Aaron Marks
In the last 3 apartments I've lived in, I have used a wireless router to both share a broadband (cable) Internet connection and create a LAN amongst several computers without having to run cables all over the place (in a house/condo it is possible to run cables around the walls and/or ceiling, but this is against the rules in apartments -- and of course it is both unseemly and a tripping hazard to have cables run across the floor). I've found that 54mbits (802.11g) is plenty for streaming a single high-quality video file, as long as you can get a good signal. I've also found that microwave ovens, washing machines, and cordless phones within 30 degrees of the signal path (when using omnidirectional antennas) tend to cause more problems than neighbours do.
Anyways, I don't see how it would be practical to set up some kind of shared connection amongst my neighbours (there are at least 3 other APs in my medium-sized apartment complex of approximately 150 units, with 1 being too weak to even connect -- not enough to cause me any problems). I wouldn't want to share my Internet connection due to the fact that I occasionally hog a lot of bandwidth, while at other times I depend on low latencies for gaming and/or work. On top of that, I wouldn't want to share my files with everyone - just those in my own apartment.
Of course this is all moot anyways since (as others have already pointed out), most people that have Wi-Fi now just want to plug it in and have it work. This is evidenced by the fact that 2 out of 3 of the APs I can "see" from my apartment (not counting mine) are totally unsecured and running on the default channel (1 of them is running a WRT54G or GS with no encryption and default password, and the other is the one that's too weak to investigate).
As others have also mentioned, both directional antennas and reduced broadcast power would help. However, nobody is going to want to invest another 100% or so of the cost of their current Wi-Fi setup just to buy antennas unless they're desperate and have some idea what they're doing.
Arguing about vi versus Emacs is like arguing whether it's better to make fire by rubbing sticks or banging rocks.
Back in my day, we had vt100 and 9600 baud, and we ran long serial cables or keyboard extension cables if you needed to be able to compute while wandering around your dorm room or a lab.
Not to mention you had to walk five miles up hill, both ways, to the computer shop to buy your terminals and carry them home, and you liked it?
I ran into the interference problem when I set up my father-in-laws computer on the network at home. It turned out that his cordless phone was also in the 802.11g range. When the computer worked the phones went to crap, when the phones worked his internet connection went south. The House was old and not really built to modern standards so it was almost impossible to predict where I would find cross braces, wires, pipes, etc. in the walls which pretty much precluded trying to run Ethernet cables. The net result was that I went out and bought a couple of LAN over Power line bridge interfaces and ran his LAN over them to get from the cable modem in the basement to his computer upstairs. So far it seems to be working fine.
Hardest part is finding the equipment to do it. The shelves at the local Best Buys and CompUSA are bursting to the seams with wireless routers, interface cards and what have you, but the two Ethernet to LAN over Power line devices I bought were the only two on the shelf. Hardware for this purpose is rarer then hens teeth out there.
Strangely though at least three people have asked me to let them know how well this works as they have similar interference problems and would like to pursue a similar solution. The cost for this was around $100 ($50 per unit) and so far their working just fine but they've only been in place a week. The units I bought were Netgear units.
Good luck to anyone else that wants to try this.
and this is exactly why 3G and HSDPA will rule.
I for one welcome our CAT5-untethered overlords!
It's a natural geek reaction to throw their FAITH in technology and science at those class of problems that have humans at their base (social problems), instead of confronting them on their own terms (dealing with people and all the messyness that that implies). If we would ONLY have enough computing power, and ENOUGH hard drives, and ENOUGH...you see were I'm going. Part of the problem with this FAITH is that the solution is essentially viewed as consequence free. While the real world is "no such thing as something for nothing" no matter how much P2P hides that fact. So what technology will we use to overcome latency, and how much will that add to the price, and how much to the complexity...and all because geeks hate dealing with other humans.
Admittedly we only use MAC filtering to restrict our network as opposed to WEP/WPA (though WPA mostly worked with wpa_supplicant/etc.), but in general we have had NO wireless-related problems with our network. The only real problems we'd had were with weird firmware issues on our wireless router. Again, admittedly, we are on "channel" 11, and the only other APs around here are on 6 (all 3 of them!) but we are really having no major issues with it. We routinely get the full 54MBps, and at the moment, if I can trust the ndiswrapper reading, my signal ratings are: Signal level:-73 dBm Noise level:-256 dBm. My wireless equipment seems capable of receiving the signal all throughout the house, though as the laptop recently died, I can't really test -everywhere-, I just use a desktop in a fixed location mostly (as opposed to drilling holes and running cable in our 100 year old house).
I wonder why powerline networking hasn't been more popular. Every house has power outlets in every room, being able to just plug a laptop, Tivo, iPod, whatever in and be on the network seems like a no brainer for ease of use.
Or taking your wireless web cam in anywhere in the house, without having to drag a 100M cat5 behind you. I've got power everywhere in the house, but not ethernet.
Besides, this density of poorly configured WAPs is a BENEFIT (at least to the out-of-towner looking for a hookup) The world's biggest wireless internet provider isn't Verizon or Cingular, it's Linksys.
Gotta go, it's time to wipe!
WHY do people put up with such crap?
I've been asking myself the same thing.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
puhlease
So the price of wireless ethernet is that it's so hard to do properly that only having a single vendor toolchain, from hub to host, can make it work? Yecch.
Bluetooth, also, I've never seen work properly. Be it a bluetooth laptop (this one was running XP), or a bluetooth cellphone headset, it strikes me as part of a growing acceptance of crapulent technology.
Here, I'll give you an example. "Hmm, our phones are reliable, clear and functional. Y'know what'd be great? Going back to the Bad Old Days of random disconnections, and having to shout into the phone five times to be understood--let's all get cellphones and use them even when we're in our own homes!"
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I work for a school district in northwestern British Columbia (and that's in Canada, folks - not South America!) We are small, and service isolated communities that only are just now getting access to broadband. Up until this year, we have been the only users of wireless networking technology in our entire area, which has been nice, to say the least. Being small, we have the technical and financial resources to provide our schools with state-of-the-art networking technologies, and one of those has been 802.11b coverage.
Unfortunately, we now have community broadband access that is available to anyone willing to pony up the $40 per month it takes to get a 128Kbps wireless connection, delivered via - you guessed it: 802.11b. Also unfortunately, the WISP doing the delivery lacks the technical expertise to deploy a network of this type without killing every other signal in the band. They crank their power outputs to full in order to provide "adequate coverage", and forget about doing site surveys first! To make matters worse, most of their customers are buying and installing wireless routers, which they naturally leave at the default settings. Then you have both the WISP and the clients all broadcasting their SSIDs, which makes it next to impossible to keep a lock on a particular network.
We are countering the threat by several means. Firstly, we are switching all of our administrative wireless networks to 802.11a, which is faster, has more available "channels", and is uncluttered. Secondly, we are disabling the broadcast of SSID, so that our neighbours don't keep jumping on our networks by mistake (We already use MAC filtering to issue IPs). Thirdly, in our school networks, which require 802.11g (we use Apple iBooks for our students), we are tripling the amount of APs we have deployed; dialling back the power output, but making sure we have continuous coverage within the schools. It's a bit challenging to keep the coverage solid without overlapping frequencies, and of course we still have to broadcast the SSID due to user issues (unless somebody can give me a better hint for this!! *grin*), but it seems to be working. Between MAC filtering, static DHCP, and some other cool stuff our server guy does, it's pretty stable. Of course, if we were in a city or urban area, we'd be screwed in terms of security, because you just can't go around throwing APs at the problem when the airwaves are as cluttered as they get in town.
We are still learning a lot as we go, but we have been implementing practises that have kept our network stable and our users happy, which is extremely important in our field!
"Apparatus dignosco occultus, satis non supernus."
What, you mean you don't have ethernet in the bathroom? Sheesh, the iToilet works so much better wired.
Yes.
I disagree. It is only a FUD that under laissez-faire, one needs to dispense with human empathy. It is not that one needs to dispense with empathy when they become a conservative, but that one changes the method or procedure for dealing with the poor and needy. Under statism, it would be the government, operating a welfare state, that would deal with the needy. But under capitalism, it would primarily be three other entities that would deal with them; these three being the family, voluntary associations, and the 'church' (through its deacons).
n _problem), Mises' criticism about the impossibility of economic calculation under a socialist commonwealth seems basically to be the strongest single argument against socialism. It is not a question of capitalism vs. socialism, because if you believe Mises' argument, socialism is actually completely impossible in its pure form, and it becomes more a question about what degree of a hampered market (or no degree at all) is optimal.
Capitalists have arguments that purport to show that not only are the unintended consequences of government intervention in the economy worse than the intended consequence, but at a more fundamental level of who is the true owner of private property and who has the rights of disposing of it, that the state has no right to steal from one person in order to give to another... even if the consequences of that are straightforwardly positive.
From what I've read, it seems like capitalists emphasize equality of liberty (from the state!) while socialists emphasize equality of opportunity (in life). I suppose which one someone prefers as more important has more to do with one's worldview and ethical system than the clear-cut factual 'brute' economic consequences of one or the other.
As for your saying that a free market is a myth, I also don't really agree. From what I have read about economic calculation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculatio
I think, from what I've read, that Rothbard's definition of a monopoly seems to be right. He defines it as an exclusive grant of trading priveleges, and as such, is fundamentally incompatible with a true free market. If an owner wants to withhold his goods from the market in order to raise prices, then in most cases competitors will appear who will drive down the price of goods as the rate of profit is temporarily, artificially higher than other sectors of the economy. And if the owner is the sole owner of the property in question, and competitors can't arise due to sheer logistics, then is that really not in the owner's legal rights? I can't think of any item in the world (if we ignore so-called intellectual property, which seems a very phony form of alleged 'ownership') that we rely on so much that really could be manipulated so easily.
Anyway, good points you raised, but from where I am coming from and what I've read I at this point disagree with your criticisms.
there is too little bandwidth allocated to this use.
What WiFi really shows is that technology has made the kinds of allocations the FCC used to do obsolete in many cases.
What we should do is kick bandwidth-hogging companies off the airwaves and make that bandwidth available under similar terms as those bands used for WiFi.
It is innate in the definition of a free market economy that poor/unsuccessful actors are not successfull. In a *truly* free economy, this means that they die of starvation, exposure, or other avoidable causes. Hand waving that "surely someone will take care of this" is avoiding the issue - taking care of this problem is one of the things we invented governments for.
Capitalists have arguments that purport to show that not only are the unintended consequences of government intervention in the economy worse than the intended consequence, but at a more fundamental level of who is the true owner of private property and who has the rights of disposing of it, that the state has no right to steal from one person in order to give to another... even if the consequences of that are straightforwardly positive.
This is a philosophical issue and can't be proven unless you already accept its assumptions. The socialist viewpoint (with very strong historical backing, although it's not in much favor today) is that it's impossible for a private individual to hold "private" property at all - and that doing so is essentially the same as stealing from the commons. You can see hints of this thinking in the arguments for property taxes.
I'd like to clarify that I'm not arguing for socialism, which I think is also a pipe dream (although it's a more comforting pipe dream than free-market capitalism), but against "pure" capitalism. Neither is realistically sustainable, any more than anarchy is.
I think, from what I've read, that Rothbard's definition of a monopoly seems to be right. He defines it as an exclusive grant of trading priveleges, and as such, is fundamentally incompatible with a true free market.
Rothbard is playing semantic games and defining his conclusion as his argument. A truly free market won't have monopolies only because the definition of a free market precludes them - once it's got monopolies it isn't free anymore. That is also totally ignoring the very real and predictable fact of historical monopolies - leveraging, say, a monopoly on water rights into extreme social and economic power has been done a million times in a million places. And if you accept the existence of private property, you accept the existence of monopolies - all private property is is an implicit or explicit grant of monopoly rights over a resource. A truly free market is not a sustainable condition - it requires outside intervention to avoid collapse. For example, a big problem today with the operation of our (not very free, but more free than others) market is the problem of information - the whole economic theory behind competition relies on informed actors. But when the information actors need is just another good to be bartered, you quickly realize that that control of the information about the market is an enormously powerful tool in manipulating that market - far more powerful than competition.
A monopoly holder doesn't have to withhold goods in order to drive up prices - by definition a monopoly is the only (or only practical) source for a good. My father in laws family made a lot of money when his (several greats) grandfather participated in a land grab in Montana - he took unfarmable land overlooking a valley that happened to be suitable for damming the only river in the valley. By leveraging that water monopoly, he was able to eventually gain monopoly control over the cattle market in that area. If he hadn't been an alcoholic, his family might well still control that part of Montana. Note that historically, this has happened lots of times. A common response is that the farmers in the valley might band together and take over control of the river. Then they'll share the water between them in common. Know what that leads to? Community control of resources - it's the beginnings of socialism.
I think it's worth n
We may be on a cusp here, in a 'golden age' of WiFi. Up to now, as more and more businesses and individuals deployed Access Points, we were seeing increasing coverage, but as the article says, at about 20 reachable APs in a given area, they start to interfere destructively and just steal each other's bandwidth.
From various anecdotal info, it may be that WiFi coverage in some urban area is close to saturating: my officemate reports 19 visible APs in his appartment in downtown DC.
If most APs were open, sort of equilibrium might establish itself---people would realize that adding their own APs actually decreases their bandwidth, and so the Tragedy of the Commons scenario would be avoided. However, with APs locked down, everyone MUST install their own, and thus everyone is drawn into the ToC fight.
When used as an Internet "access point", it's unusual to bottleneck the air link, because the link to the Internet is slower than the air link. But if you have a local server, as we did, the air link was the bottleneck. CVS checkouts would hang every time.
We had three Linksys boxes, so we know it wasn't a single-point hardware problem. Probably botched buffer management. It wasn't an interference problem.
... but wireless power does exist. It is most commonly seen during what is commonly known as a thunderstorm. Go stick a fork in the nearest outlet if you doubt me, because sparks will fly.
Actually, more seriously, there is already limited use of wireless electricity in hospitals to recharge pacemakers and the like to avoid having to cut open the patient or put a plug on his chest (too matrix-like I guess)
I am Spartacus