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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."
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.
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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?
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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!".
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I remember using voice chat rooms best part of a decade ago, so yeah VoIP is basic so far as bandwidth needs. I expect they're using "VoIP" as the trendy name for chat in general (c.f. mp3 vs. audio file) and thinking of conferencing like iChat AV with multiple video streams but higher resolution so that you can see useful stuff rather than just have the pleasure of seeing a moving face.
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.
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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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