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Ubiquitous Multi-Gigabit Wireless Within Three Years
Anonymous Howard passed us a link to the Press Escape blog, and a post about the future of ultra-fast wireless connectivity. Georgia Tech researchers unveiled plans to use ultra-high frequency radio transmissions to achieve very high data transmission rates over short distances. In a few years, the article says, we'll have ubiquitous multi-gigabit wireless connectivity, with some significant advances already under their belts. "GEDC team have already achieved wireless data-transfer rates of 15 gigabits per second (Gbps) at a distance of 1 meter, 10 Gbps at 2 meters and 5 Gbps at 5 meters. 'The goal here is to maximize data throughput to make possible a host of new wireless applications for home and office connectivity,' said Prof. Joy Laskar, GEDC director and lead researcher on the project along with Stephane Pinel. Pinel is confident that Very high speed, p2p data connections could be available potentially in less than two years. The research could lead to devices such as external hard drives, laptop computers, MP-3 players, cell phones, commercial kiosks and others could transfer huge amounts of data in seconds while data centers could install racks of servers without the customary jumble of wires."
do not underestimate the bandwidth of a harddrive being passed to the friend next to you.
liqbase
"per" is written /, not p. So people should write Gbit/s or Gb/s.
Hey, they've got the Internet on computers now!
Eek!
What if the Hokey Pokey really is what it's all about?
...and let me guess... these multi-gig wireless routers will STILL come configured by default with WEP
(because it's easy to set up)
Maybe some lower security data centers might enable wireless, but I doubt it. Being that we're a financial institution (a small one, mind you), there's no way in the h to the e to the double hockey sticks that I'd ever enable any kind of wireless anything in our data center.
I'd rather deal with a network cable gone sentient and whipping around like a snake and attacking people, than go wireless at the data center.
Only an idiot thinks there's a wireless transmission that's invulnerable to being intercepted. Heck, wired communications aren't 100% secure, either, but my boss's business is about minimizing risk, and wireless networks even inside a data center is not minimizing risk.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
Could this kind of bandwidth run a remote display?
I always thought it would be cool to have a pad that was nothing more than a screen and input device that you could carry around the home instead of a full-fledged laptop. You would be actually "running" your powerful desktop off basically a second screen that you could carry around with you in the house.
...if the server sending that mp3 down is doing so at 5KB/sec. Seriously I still can't even max out my year 2000 Linksys router.
The Government spends money on everything else, why not spend it on something useful?
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
You'll be able to watch pr0n through your neighbors open wireless network *and* fry up a steak by positioning the frying pan between the access point and your notebook. Don't worry, the sunburn should fade in a few weeks.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I can't see any real application for this in a data center. They'll always use wires, switches, and routers. One simple reason is that one bad wireless transmitter could jam a whole bunch of nearby servers, which probably wouldn't be good. Wires have their uses. Sometimes it's good to keep your data flow contained and controlled.
data-transfer rates of 15 gigabits per second (Gbps) at a distance of 1 meter
Three years away because it will currently roast a baby at the same distance.
great. now ill never have a reason to meet girls
Yeah! Cause the biosphere wasn't already inundated with electromagnetic radiation. Its a good thing the rest of the universe doesn't spew loads of it towards the Earth. Oh wait...
Somehow I don't see "whole data centers" using a data transmission method where any device can potentially intercept the data going to and coming from any other device. Might make your hosting clients a bit nervous.
"Murphy was an optimist" - O'Toole's commentary on Murphy's Law
Sure you can get 15Gbps, but if you start sharing that bandwidth among dozens of servers it wouldn't be all that fast anyway.
There are 2 ways to increase the amount of data that can be sent. Increase the carrier frequency or increase the bandwidth. What these people have done is increase the carrier frequency. Wireless today runs on 2.4ghz, these devices run up to 60ghz. What does that mean? Well it'll take more energy, higher frequency means higher energy, also it attenuates more, meaning shorter range. Not only that, but it can will be more readily absorbed by things like bricks, desks, your foot, etc.
The alternative to this is to increase bandwidth, say use 2.1ghz through 2.6ghz for 1 signal. The obviously downsides to this are you can't run many concurrent streams.
All in all wireless data transfer has a very real ceiling on the amount of data that can be transferred, lower frequency means longer range and ability to go through obstacles, at the cost of reduced data-carrying capacity. I guess the point of this post is to point out that there is only so far we can go with wireless data transfer. I don't think it will be able to keep up (over the long run) with the increasing size of traffic to be a viable alternative to cables when it comes to things like comptuer networking. Anyone have any thoughts on this?
If you are about to mod me down, keep in mind that this post was most likely sarcastic.
Tin foil hat act like antenna and capture all of multi-gigabit signal and route all of data direct to cerebral cortex, where corpus medula hippocampus cerebellum act like giant "Google" and put all "byte" into main storage. some time Often cause all of sound to "ears" like bad technical translation Chinese goto English, like bad video game of the cheap PC accessories. when All of signal "Scramble" brainwave, error message to help tech support gets to you responding quickly. Zipping all of signs to Brain cause core dump
I can throw as many stones as I wish; my house is made of transparent aluminum.
This technology could be used in applications besides just strict data transfer. 15Gbs should be fast enough to drive a display, as well. The proverbial rats' nest behind your computer could completely disappear with this technology. Keyboards, mice, displays, network - Just about cable plugged into the back of your computer could be replaced with wireless this fast.
But if only it were so simple. Of course now the problem we have is with security. Never mind TEMPEST. If you had a big enough antenna and you could decrypt (it IS encrypted...heavily...right?) the datastream emanating from this technology from a distance - you could see the display, keystrokes, data transfers, everything. Obviously, strong encryption is very important - But the overhead from strong encryption will reduce the theoretical bandwidth because of the extra baggage on the packets, and increase costs significantly because of the very specialized ASICs that will likely be required to encrypt a stream at that speed. And they'd have to be standard across all devices. AND an exploit had better not be discovered in the algorithm. Then there's the issue of the 60GHz band. A frequency that high is very unforgiving of obstructions, even at the short ranges we're talking about. If you have a metal desk, forget it. And what about jamming from computers in close proximity? What about from a "l33t hax0r" with some time on his hands and an inclination to make trouble?
-R
As opposed to all that radiation saturating the biosphere not of our own making? You do realise that light is radiation right? Also, in case you're worried about all the terrible WiFi access points, your average 60 watt bulb puts off far more energy (radiation) than any WiFi AP in use. Now, admittedly, not all radiation has the same effect on everything (such as UV), but the key thing with EM radiation like light and radio waves is the total power and the distance from the source. Remember, power dissipates with the square of the distance, so if you're anything but sitting on top of the transmitter, and even then if it's relatively low power, you've got more to worry about standing outside on a sunny day. The fact that they're talking about such short distances with this tech leads me to believe this will probably be a very low power device, much the same as bluetooth and RFID are.
Curiosity was framed, Ignorance killed the cat.
It might be commercially 'possible' in a few years, and I'm sure that countries other than the US will even have it, but the US ISP monopolies will never make it available.
Technoli
dialup anyone?
Crowding Issues resolved by the AMAZING WIRELESS technology from Larry Fullerton, read this first: http://www.engology.com/eng5fullerton.htm then this http://www.timedomain.com/ This is like nothing you have ever heard of, in that it is ULTRA LOWPOWER, ULTRA WIDE BAND not in the typical sense, UNDETECTABLE, and so super scary that the military has embargoed its FULL use precisely because it is undetectable by conventional frequency scanners... Also please check out http://teaminfinity.com/robo_economy_wire for great news on ROBOTIC FRONT
The Future is already here, just unevenly distributed... THE ROBOTIC WAGELESS ECONOMY NOW! http://RoboEco.com/slash
You can run at 2.45Ghz, and instead of keeping constant power of a few milliwatts, instead, say, modulate the power output from, you know, 1000 watts to 1.21 gigawatts, you can use the resulting modulation to carry more information per wave. This would be really hot new technology, and really start the economy cookin'.
...when it said wireless in the data center. Yes, I've heard the theoretical figures for wi-fi. Try dropping a bunch of access points and various clients in tight proximity and see what it's really like. In a datacenter you can run 10x 10Gbps wires right next to eachother without problems. Can you do that with wireless? Hell no. I imagine the speeds quoted are ideal with free line-of-sight and no interference, good luck trying to achieve that in that bunch of wires. Personally I was fed up with wireless when I realized one AP couldn't even cover the ground floor of my parent's house. It'd take probably three to cover the whole house. Great... not.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Remember, power dissipates with the square of the distance, ...
That's only for an isotropic source. If what you said was true for general sources, there would hardly be a point to making spotlights or low dispersion lasers or directional antennae. Fiber optics would be impossible.
Dispersion lowers your energy density, which lowers your power at a point.
I fail to see how this would be useful in anything but a few specialized applications. Most of the time if you need that kind of speed you're not moving around all that much.
Unless there is going to be a huge increase in available bandwidth in the home ISP market I can't see how having that kind of speed for the average user would be useful. Even the fastest connection that could be considered widely available is Verizon's FIOS and that's only 50 Mbps.
The only thing I can think of that would make this useful is a direction antenna setup to link two sites together.
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed H
You've convinced me. We must destroy the Sun!
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
The i-squared-r law at 60ghz means that even if the spectra was available (it's not) then you'll need both line of site (reflections won't help and will slow the data rate considerably) and you'll need the will to gulp content that fast. Of course, a shared fixture like an access point in WiFi suffers from duty-cycle problems and raw bandwidth will help. But we could also use spread-spectrum and/or advanced coding techniques like n-Pole modulation to accomplish the same thing.
Therefore, with all due respect to the geeks in Georgia, this is like saying: Hey-- wireless is going to be way faster!!!!! in some breathless sort of way.
No duh. Now jump over the obstacles. There are huge numbers of them, and only the surface ones are seemingly scratched here.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
I don't mean to be a wet blanket, but all of the advantages of the latest whiz-bang technology don't amount to a bucket of warm spit unless and until the major carriers adopt it. If I live to be a hundred, I'll never see Gigabit data service where I live in the St. Louis MetroEast area of Illinois because no one will force our regulated monopoly (AT&T) to provide it. Until Universal Service is expanded to include broadband, and regulatory bodies set the definition of the term broadband to be 2 Mbits/sec or higher, AT&T will continue to offer only POTS and dial-up service to my established suburban neighborhood.
Ok so I can theoretically get 5-15 Gbs at 5-1 meters. That's not an incredibly useful distance for most people. Also, the broadband connection to the home's speed is currently ~1000 times less. I do not personally see the need for much higher speeds in the home then are available with 802.11n (74Mbs typ)
I'm more concerned that we have dropped from 4th to 13th in broadband penetration. Let's get a faster pipe TO the home first.
I'm a data center manager too (for a moderate sized govt organization with just under 100 servers and 6 separate network backbones). Posting AC because... well, here's your tax dollars at work :-}
:-/
I fought off enabling any wireless on my turf for as many years as I could, but now my superiors have *ORDERED* me to install 802.11 devices all over the place, despite the fact that I consider installing wireless to constitute a deliberate removal of security from our network. Oh well, at least I get to dictate how the wireless will be "secured", so everything will be WPA2/AES encrypted with EAP-TLS certificate-based authentication wherever feasible and EAP-TTLS wherever client-side certificates are unfeasible. Also, just for grins, I'm going to also employ MAC-address filtering too, even though that's not really a serious form of security in and of itself, it does least throw one more time-wasting stumbling block at anyone trying to break in wirelessly. Any wireless client devices that are unable to play by these rules are simply deemed "unsupported" on the WLAN that's being rammed down my throat.
Wireless will just have to be a "managed risk" that I must deal with.
Yeehaw
Harald
UHF frequencies (millimeter waves and microwaves) cannot cause cancer. The photon energy is not high enough to break chemical bonds in biological tissue.
When a chemical bond is formed (say, in DNA), a certain amount of energy is released. To break that bond (and cause cancer), you need to put that energy back. The catch is, because of quantum mechanics, the energy can't be accumulated. You can't pile in more and more photons until it finally snaps; you have to get one big photon to come in and snap it. When you state the frequency of a photon source (e.g. 60 GHz), that indicates the energy of each individual photon (0.00024 eV). Typical bonds in DNA are on the order of hundreds of eV. It's physically impossible for this to cause cancer.
Even if you put your cat in a microwave oven, it won't get cancer (though it will die a pretty horrible death).
The danger with electromagnetic waves is heat and depth. UHF electromagnetic waves have far less energy per photon than visible light (~2.5 eV), but they have much greater depth penetration. They go deeper before they collide with your molecules, so they deposit heat deeper into your flesh than visible light or UV radiation. This is why putting your cat in a microwave is very bad; it essentially gets "cooked from the inside out". But the energy outputted by wireless devices is barely enough to cause even measurable changes in the temperature of human flesh. How much heat can you apply to a glass of water with a 1.5 V AA battery? Not much. Now spread that out spherically in a 100 meter radius. Almost zero.
Even then, biological organisms are very good at regulating their temperature; humans live across a wide variety of climates all across Earth, and yet still manage to balance their internal temperature.
Hence, UHF communications are not dangerous.
Even if for no reason other than having security of communications, it would be preferable if data were communicated via fiberoptic cable. Bonus points for creating optical transceivers that don't broadcast their signals all over the RF spectrum as a side-effect of operation.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I have a 100mbps ethernet connection that not many devices use to its full potential.
And we have 40gbps OC-192 cables...
Wireless is plain stupid except for laptops. I don't see the point in making everything wireless, just like I don't see Big Iron dying tomorrow.
99% of all the CO2 in the atmosphere is natural, and we chalk up a change in climate to our 1% fluctuation, as if, that vast lion of 99% doesn't fluctuate on its own. So, why not worry about radiowaves in a radioactive universe.
This is my sig.
before you get caught up in a security breach scandal and the orders they gave you to implement wireless networking get sealed up in one of Dubya's supersecret war on terror files.
Polish up your resume and quit now.
Really, I'm not kidding.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
I work at a state govt outfit, not federal, and they pay me very well... equal to, or slightly better than a private company would, and the benefits package is unbeatable. My job is also virtually guaranteed until I retire, and any wireless security breach will not be held against me personally, especially since the dictatum to install the wireless and my protests about the security issues are well documented in memos that are now official records. I will be able to say "I told you so", if a wireless breach happens.
The point, I guess I was trying to make is that there's not really such a thing as realistic true security in any kind of network anymore, except perhaps for one that is unplugged and powered off. It's all a system of "managed risks" now. That's just a part of life in this IT business.
there's no way in the h to the e to the double hockey sticks that I'd ever enable any kind of wireless anything in our data center. ... my boss's business is about minimizing risk, and wireless networks even inside a data center is not minimizing risk.
Your network is on the internet. That and any non free software you have are bigger threats than sftp over wireless.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
First, successful lab demonstration of multi-gigabyte speeds with mass-market capable technology is still missing. Call that at least 5 years to a real product. Then deployment. Who needs this stuff enough to deploy it immediately? Right, allmost nobody. Also the first product generation will not really be usable. Call it another 5 years to wide-scale deployment. That gives me an estimate of at least 10 years, but more likely 20 years. The 3 years are a direct lie, plain and simple.
I hope these ethically challenged scumbags get what they deserve.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I expect the line-of-sight requirement is a dealbreaker for 'personal area network' type situations. I've got my computer underneath my desk, and all gadgets that could possibly benefit from high-speed wireless links are above the desk. Reconfiguring my desk to provide LOS for everything (including keeping the desk clean, no stacks of paper between the computer and the gadgets) would be a major PITA. I'll stick with wired connections, thank you.
High-speed wireless could be useful for 'last mile' connections, but I doubt 10+-GHz networks will take off for home or office use.
I think a lot of people reading this are confused.
:)
This is NOT wifi! These ultra high frequency devices are NOT for connecting to internet/lan networks!
This is a technology for replacing wires from the back of your devices, like instead of driving your TV through VGA, S-Video, or HDMI, it would be wireless. Or, instead of AV cables between your VCR and cable box, they use a signal in the 60ghz range to communicate wirelessly instead.
The ONLY way a 60ghz device is going to connect you to the internet is if someone builds an external NIC that sits on top of your computer instead of in it, and then connects via 802.11 or a network cable to the rest of your network.
The uses this technology is designed for will, so long as manufacturers aren't retarded, never require anything like an access point, and it sure as hell isn't ever going to require a router, unless of course it is designed to sit within a few feet of another device and connect wirelessly to it.
It's like replacing the cable from your hard drive to the motherboard, NOT the cable from your NIC card to the router. A new type of fiber optical cable will likely replace that.
It's basically to get rid of the growing rats nest of cables all our devices create. Think setting your ipod on top of your computer and streaming music from it, that kind of stuff.
That's pretty much every type of example I can come up with to make it clear what this is for. The ISPs and cellular carriers will NEVER have anything to do with this, at best it will be the cell phone manufacturers who impliment this for connecting to your other devices.
By the way, there is a similar tech for wirelessly transmitting power over very short distances as well, so we may soon just be setting devices near each other and they start working. Talk about making things easy!
so this goes from firewire to fire air? :)
OK, not that bad. I'm a little disappointed in ATT 2.5G.
You're a Luddite. And although you might lack it, the rest of the world do have that exact science that you never heard of.
I want something different too. I dont want higher speed, I want more range. I want one or two megabits at 30 miles
Thirty miles is an alright start but I'd like at least 100 or 200 mile range. I love hiking and photography and would like to be able to upload, transmit my photos wirelessly to a server. While it may be possible to do so with a 30 mile range that would require a lot more tower transceivers.
FalconShould there be a Law?
This would be awesome.
Right now the wires are a huge mess going every which way. The wire monkeys don't even know how they're cabled up.
All the logical decisions about whether or not to pass traffic could be done by host-based firewalls, one per machine.
At our datacenter where we have layers and layers of firewalls, we could simplify everything and just have one firewall, between the host and the Internet.
Dear Luddite,
The data is not with you. Test after test has dispelled the general myth that all pervasive radiation regardless of characteristics must be bad. If you have something more than general hand-wringing and whining about our fallible nature then please post it.
Can any of them still reproduce?
KeS
My biggest fan would have me point to a link proving the relative insecurity of non free software. I think he should simply look around.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
in the spirit of scientific exploration, i tried this. the good news is that that shady chinese restaurant down the street is having a special for tomorrow's lunch :-)
i kid! i kid! i love the chinese (tastes good with soy sauce :-)
--iggy_mon - www.ananonymouskiller.com - Die Trying -
That's a nice link you have there, BTW. Everyone should click on it.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
What an awesome future to look forward too. Coffee shops won't need to waste money on those large heated thermoses to keep their brew warm. Their local access points can simply do that for them. =P
I wonder how much this will affect your brains or fry your nuts.
I'm sure everything else you say is correct, but heating a glass of water with a 1.5V AA battery? You sure? I once put a 15cm long, 5mm diameter spring, probably 300 turns or so, across one of those bad-boys and it gave me a nasty burn really fast! I guess maybe it would have run down pretty quickly if I hadn't dropped it, though.
Working for an isp that primarily focuses on wireless technology, I am looking forward to this. Although I've read some valid points for those of you who focus on the data center part of this, there is another line of bussiness where this actually is a good idea. First of all, fibre being expensive to dig down, takes a long time to install and has all the obvious obstacles and problems (it has obvious advantages too, no doubt about it). Here my company has had success in using STM-1 (or OC-3 for you Americans) radiolinks converted into Ethernet, or even faster radiolinks now available for back haul to places where fibre wasn't an option (or at least a too expensive option). A radiolink can be installed in a day, where as fibre might take a month or two. Having a wireless connection that can perform more than a gigabit per second can only be an advantage, and can push high-speed internet connections to areas where this was previously impossible.
Another aspect of this is the dominance of copper-based (DSL) connections that in many countries are monopolized through one company owning the entire copper net, and furthermore are limited in their transmission capabilities. Although technologies such as VDSL and VDSL2 promisses up to 100Mbit synchronous, they have a lot of issues regarding the requirements to the quality of the copper, the maximum distance to the DSLAM etc. (Wikipedia on VDSL2)
High-speed wireless connection could change this dominance and bring true synchronous broadband to the people. While I have no illusions that your average John and Jane Doe will have a 60Ghz wireless connection on their roof top, it will ease the roll out of other wireless connections, for instance the much-hyped WiMAX technology, and enable cariers to provide a "holistic" wireless service with all the beforementioned advantages.
"Even if you put your cat in a microwave oven, it won't get cancer (though it will die a pretty horrible death)."
Are you sure that would be horrible? I would think that, with sufficient use of power, it would be as good as painless. If I were pro-death penalty, I would propose it as an alternative for the electric chair (dyeing in the center of a nuclear blast would be even more humane, but that is not too practical)