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IEEE Developments in Wireless Networking
JamesAlfaro writes "After much wrangling between opposing interests among the members of the IEEE, a first draft for the Wi-Fi IEEE 802.11n specification received approval in a Thursday meeting. Final ratification of the standard is not expected until next year." Relatedly, judgecorp writes "The IEEE has disbanded its working group on ultrawideband. They are leaving the marketplace to decide between two competing approaches." From the article: "Freescale, first to the market with UWB products, believes its headstart will give it a long-term victory, while WiMedia, with the backing of industry heavyweights including Intel and Microsoft, reckons its punch will eventually win through, even without a formal IEEE standard."
So now I can wait on the hotel's 1.544 DSL line even faster?
Are the various 802.11 "Pre-n" routers compatible with the draft standard? That would be unfortunate if they aren't, because they are rather expensive compared to b/g ones.
"Scud Storm!" -- Jeremy of PurePwnage.com
I think it would be quite nice if they could at least co-operate to some degree with these UWB WiFi technologies. It's easy for the /. crowd to understand these compatibility issues but it can only be hassle for the general consumer who barely understand the current wireless standards/speeds.
Pogo: Ever see two dogs fight over a bone?
Albert: yea
Pogo: Ever see the bone fight back?
Albert looks thoughful.
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Great, another wireless standard whose lack of *nix Driver support will undoubtedly make my machine act all twitchy ...
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How about out-of-the-box *nix support that doesn't involve me devoting my spare time, work hours and waking moments getting it to run, or run as it should
Ran with NDISWrapper for a long time on my laptop, gave up after my last upgrade when Ubuntu dicked me. Now I've just got this really long, really sad cat5 cable that follows me around the house... My dog thinks it's his pal
Another technology called Space Time Block Coding (STBC) will reduce signal dropout by using multiple antennas for redundancy.
I knew all those years of Star Trek would eventually lead to every day applications.
Now we can use our wireless routers for subspace communication with strange new worlds and new life forms, and boldly route where no one has routed before.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
I get 54Mbps on WiFi now. That's more than fast enough for VoIP.
With so many (or so few?) standards, I think over time we'll have devices that speak most, some, or all of these protocols. We had the same thing with the old-style telephone modems, the 16.8 HST, and early pseudo-56Ks. What I want is more public bandwidth. Will the FCC dedicate a TV channel to the public? Will that help our wireless Internet?
Zhrodague.net - I do projects and stuff too.
More technologies that do the same thing, yet are incompatible with each other. "Oh, we'll let the market sort this one out". translation: "MWAHAHAHAHAA! Screw the consumers! It's up to the little guy to figure this one out, because we will have nothing to do with it!".
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
Now if some group can just build a warp drive, then I can get off this crazy planet. I guess I could just call someone.
"Hay, Vulan people. Get me off this crazy planet. Yes, I'll bring a copy of Linux!"
Zhrodague.net - I do projects and stuff too.
That would take a hardware company built from the ground up to use open source. Yes, it is needed, for video cards, audio, wireless, etc. All of the above. I know of some minimal efforts, but nothing really stands out except in obscure embedded. We need a white knight, something like a google/ibm blend to do this. It would be nice if it started from scratch, and had an IPO to get funding to get going. I am not sure if it would work, but with enough pre release advertising it might. Despite Linux being in use by businesses all over, and at the forefront of academic research, it's still the red headed step child when it comes to large corporations and hardware. It's always something like "oh, ya, we took one engineer 2 hours a week on his lunch break and here's his blog and code download area, there ya go Linux d00dz, support!1!!"
The practical problems with ultra-wideband are huge. This is probably a technology that should be approached incrementally rather than all at once.
We've played with an ultra-wideband RF link in the lab. It's not pretty. Between the top of the band and the bottom of the band, the propagation changes a lot. Ditto for the noise profile. We used discone antennas (because they are inherently wideband) but those aren't practical for mobile use.
We were successful in the lab for low data rates but, of course, that isn't the real world.
I like the sound of this "Beam Forming technology."
I often use APs to connect two wired networks. (think: neighbors sharing one cable internet bill) I always thought it would be nice to aim the signal instead of just broadcasting in every direction. I looked into getting after-market directional antennae, but it is nice they are including this in the new standard.
Emphasis mine... why do those companies and non-adherence to standards not surprise me?
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UWB Standards Group Calls It Quits "
Unable to resolve a deadlock between two competing proposals, the IEEE working group responsible for the ultrawideband technology threw in the towel Thursday.
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 802.15.3a task group (TG3a), which oversaw the formation of the UWB standard agreed to withdraw the Jan. 2003 project authorization request that formed the group. Instead, the two competing technologies - MB-OFDM, championed by the Intel-led WiMedia Forum, and DS-UWB, promoted by Freescale Semiconductor and its UWB Forum - will be left to fight it out in the marketplace.
Intel has open source wireless drivers, open source graphics drivers, etc. Their technology tends to lag behind the cutting edge, but maybe that's the price of freedom.
And there was me thinking that Diversity already did that...
That's ether, aether or even æther, not eather.
OK, spelling police going back to the station now.
It references a page that makes no mention of the IEEE disbanding the UWB group?!?
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I think a lot of customers will be disspaointed when they discover this, perhaps having bought this equipment under false pretenses.
That is all well and good for corperate environments that need network access to programs from a server but seriously. This speed is 40 times faster then the connection I have at home for my internet. Unless you are doing things over your home network (Streaming video I suppose) there is no reason to upgrade.
The trouble is that theses companies will be pushing "N" routers like crazy when noone needs it. Unless it offers super Encryption of 802.11i then count me out.
Procrastinating life a way at a rapid rate of speed.
Some extra reading:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/802.11n#802.11n -- 802.11n Standard
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WiMax -- The New, utra-wide range, wifi standard
Last year I upgraded my home network to something faster than 802.11b. Even though my cable internet provider is providing download speeds significantly lower than the about 5 mpbs transfer speeds I get with 802.11b. So why did I upgrade? Because I do a lot of large file transfers between computers on my home network. I have done some contract work setting up networks for small businesses where they also have to transfer large files between servers and workstations. A wireless standard that transfers files as fast as 100 megabit ethernet will cost my clients more for hardware, but they will no longer have to pay for somebody to come in and install cat 5 cable for all the notebooks.
Lets get some facts straight:
UWB has been around since the early 1950's when the military started developing it. It is ACTUALLY a simplier radio than an 802.11 radio,
While we're getting facts straight...
Actually there were TWO major types of UWB being considered by the IEEE group. One I'd characterize as an orthogonal-wavelet direct-sequence spread spectrum approach, plowsharing older military tech, which appears to be the one you're describing. The other was a orthogonal-frequency-division-multiplexing approach, very much like WiFi, DVB, and a number of other systems (such as the Ricochet wireless network and the Telebit Trailblazer modems.)
The systems had different technical advantages and disadvantages. (For instance: The DS system was simpler and lower power hardware, but needed notch filters on transmit to avoid interfering with other services that were still active in its band and depended on forward error correction to compensate for pattern sensitivity from the notch filters and the propagation differences across the band. The OFDM system could notch out on transmit just by chosing not to send on those segments of the band and processed each chunk of band separately so wasn't bothered by selective propagation conditions, but required a lot of DSP power on both transmit and recieve, and still needed filters to keep narrow-band interference from saturationg the receiver A-to-D converter.)
A bigger issue, though, was that the engineering talents required to work with the two systems were different. A WiFi OFDM team could just move to the OFDM system with little new knowlege. The DS system requried a somewhat different skill set to engineer - a digital/analog interface mix. There were plenty of engineers with skills availabe for each system. But they were largely DIFFERENT engineers.
Each system had several companies - at least one a major player - backing it. And of course each player was backing their bet with advance engineering on their approach, and so was heavily invested. Since both systems would perform very well (alone), the choice became more a matter of politics, protecting the companys' investments and technical lead, than of the technical merits of the respective systems.
Since a supermajority of the players in the standards voting was needed to make a pick, neither side had it, and neither was willing to bend, the process bogged down. It became apparent a couple years ago that the standards effort would fail, the working group would throw in the towel, "the marketplace would decide". And without a standard in place only the big guys would be able to play. (The chip companies were ahead and were giving advanced chip info only to major, established, partners. So even a startup intending only to assemble a device was out in the cold.)
The two systems, however, would NOT share the band well. Each would tend to jam the other. The DS side (the smaller faction) tried to salvage the train wreck. They proposed a slower, robust, common transmission mode that could be handled by either system with trivial additions to its hardware and firmware (and less effort on the OFDM faction's part than their own), to be used for the short bursts of communication involved in time-slicing the channels. And for the standard to prescirbe using this and standardizing a version of each of the two approaches.
But the OFDM group was not interested. They had more players, and the players had gotten together to do their own, internal standardization effort of their own systems. For them the standardization effort was mainly an exercise in keeping the DS group (which needed less time to get equipment ready for market) from moving until they were ready to go with their stuff. (Within their approach and with the OFDM version of the draft standard as a reference, they could go to market once they had something ready and tune out any minor incompatibilites among themselves with firmware tweaks, and there were more of them so they had the odds down,
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If it's so simple, why isn't it totally mainstream? A lot of people are working really hard to make this technology practical. I agree that the hardware is, in theory, quite simple. I agree that people have been able to demonstrate this technology for a long time.
Guess what. The technology isn't practical yet. All the problems mentioned in the original post exist. As for low low transmit power: the speed you can send data at depends on your signal to noise ratio. Period. Full stop. If I'm willing to send data at one baud, then I can get away with a transmit power measured in pico-watts. If I want to send data faster then I will need more power. You obviously missed the lecture on Shannon.
Sitting beside me now are four new-in-box Intel Pro/Wireless 5000 wireless access points.
PC Magazine, 5/21/2002:
"...optional support for 802.11b and a reasonable price make the Intel PRO/Wireless 5000 802.11a Access Point worthy of consideration if you want to be an early adopter of 802.11a."
C|Net, 7/31/2002:
"With its simultaneous support of 802.11a and 802.11b, the Intel Pro/Wireless 5000 LAN dual access point is well suited to open office areas packed with wireless PCs."
2002 price: $449 list according to PC Magazine, $649 according to C|Net.
I got mine from an outfit called surpluscomputers.com for four bucks a piece. Plus $12 shipping. Here's a link to the product if it's still in stock (it is now, but probably won't be after the Slashdotters hit it).
The moral of the story: compatibility with the next standard is fine and dandy, but in three or four years, you're going to look back and either laugh, cry, or hurl.
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
Longer range would be a bonus (article mentions 50% improvement), but why bother with a 600 Mbps standard? The vast majority of users are on 728 kbps DSL or 3 Mbps cable. Even most LAN's are 100 Mbps and will be for several years, at least. Even then, no one except the most specialized users would have any need to exceed 54 Mbps. Is this standard really worth the effort and expense, not just of drafting the standard, but also fielding compliant equipment?
I've used many different setups of 802.11g and I've never seen it do more than a sustained 2.8mbytes a second.
.11g beat that - even with immense overhead I can't seem to see how they claim it's 54mbit?
That's 22.4mbits, NEVER have I seen
Does anyone know what the deal is? I wouldn't be susprised if this 300mbit standard is only just as fast as ethernet.