Slashdot Mirror
Fast Wi-Fi's Slow Road To Standardization
CWmike contributes this excerpt from Computerworld: "For a technology that's all about being fast, 802.11n Wi-Fi sure took its sweet time to become a standard, writes Steven J. Vaughan Nichols. In fact, until September 2009, it wasn't, officially, even a standard. But that didn't stop vendors from implementing it for several years beforehand, causing confusion and upset when networking gear that used draft standards from different suppliers wouldn't always work at the fastest possible speed when connected. It wasn't supposed to be that way. But, for years, the Wi-Fi hardware big dogs fought over the 802.11n protocol like it was a chew toy. The result: it took five drama-packed years for the standard to come to fruition. The delay was never over the technology. In fact, the technical tricks that give 802.11n its steady connection speeds of 100Mbps to 140Mbps have been well-known for years."
= Wi-fight?
Guess not.
Are we due for a new, faster, standard now, since it has been 5 years for this to come to fruition?
The Mothership
Well, I brought a WRT-600n and got worse coverage that with the older WRT-54GS I had been using; totally unimpressed. I now run with an Asus WL-520gu using Tomato firmware, very nice.
Betamax vs. VHS, HD-DVD vs. Blu-Ray, now Wi-Fi draft N versus finalized standard draft N.
Open standards are a good thing. They avoid these kinds of problems. They promote interoperability. They also force vendors to compete on the merits of their implementations of those standards instead of competing on the basis of who is better at customer lock-in. It also lessens but does not remove the competition of who is the best at marketing.
If you care about assigning blame, it lies squarely on the people who purchased draft-N hardware. Whether they realized it or not, they were using their wallets to vote for this behavior. Those purchasing decisions reward this kind of behavior and make it profitable. Give companies the choice of agreeing on a standard or making no sales and they will agree on a standard every time.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
I love this line; "The result: it took five drama-packed years for the standard to come to fruition"
Yep, this has definitely kept me on the edge of my seat waaayyyy more than watching Lost or Heroes.
"Michael, I did nothing. I did absolutely nothing - and it was everything that I thought it could be."
Between crap home routers and microwaves knocking out my signal I'm just sticking to good ole fashioned cables. Wifi has been nothing but a headache in the years I've used it. Give me a good ethernet cable anyday.
BG is good enough, tied to residential/office network, and hard to notice the benefit of N.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
Maybe the problem is lack of demand, how many people need the speed, for that matter how many people need the speed of 802.11G. These days everything seems to be about streaming media, at home people stream media off the internet, or for the more geeky stream it off a media server. So do they really need a wireless connection that is 50 times faster than a typical home broadband connection, particularly when these N routers are over twice the price of their G counterparts.
Ike
and one from the US Constitution:
Try again, Congress.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
The same thing happened with 802.11g. I remember going through four 802.11g PCI cards before finding one that could communicate with my 802.11g router at a distance of more than three feet. I was not aware that the devices were pre-draft (they didn't state "pre-draft" on the packaging like they do now), so I did not realize that was causing my problem. Eventually the standard was ratified, and if my memory is correct, the manufacturers released firmware updates so that the devices complied with the ratified standard. I doubt that this practice will go away since the manufacturers want to release bleeding-edge technology to stay ahead of the competition, but at least their packaging now states "pre-draft" so that cautious consumers will know to avoid it.
an Australian government
and one from the US Constitution: ... Try again, Congress.
Does this not point out a flaw in your logic?
How the hell can someone misspell CSIRO, then get it right 1 sentence later, then get it WRONG AGAIN in the very next paragraph?!?
IEEE, "I" = International.
CISRO = Australian.
US Constitution = United States.
Tell me again how Congress failed us when the standard was held up in an international standards body by an agency of the Australian government?
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
an Australian government
and one from the US Constitution: ... Try again, Congress.
Does this not point out a flaw in your logic?
He's obviously suggesting that U.S. Congress failed because it didn't order an invasion of Australia to promote the progress of science.
My sig will be released in 2015 third quarter. Rating pending.
an Australian government
and one from the US Constitution: ... Try again, Congress.
Does this not point out a flaw in your logic?
He's obviously suggesting that U.S. Congress failed because it didn't order an invasion of Australia to promote the progress of science.
seconded!
for Science!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
I get my N router tomorrow and I cant wait to try it out!
Visit my Forums?
Despite the moniker of "open standard" every vendor who contributes to these standards and who has "voting" authority on them have to maintain their business interests. 802.11n was held up more for business reasons, members are competitors remember, where some didn't have product available. They obviously want to make sure that their engineering and pre-manufacturing ramp ups are in line before the standard is released. Like 802.11n, this didn't stop many vendors from releasing "pre standard" products as soon as the RF standards were put into place. In reality it then becomes a firmware or driver issue to become compliant once the status is released.
If the standards boards were truly "open" then they'd get the standards drafted, agreed to and voted on in short order. The reality is that they need the industry experts and those experts also have to maintain their company's interests. It won't change, just learn to live with it.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
One of the tricks is low density parity check codes (LDPCC) which are the best currently known error correcting codes. They're decoded with a wonderfully elegant decoding algorithm which is embarresingly parallel so it works very well in hardware.
In fact, you can pretty much implement the belief network in hardware directly.
The codes are also used in 10G Ethernet, too.
Funny thing is that they date from the 60's, but were impractical because of the amount of computation required to decode them. The decoding algorithm was then rediscovered for inference on Bayes nets.
If you lick this sort of thing, it is worth reading Mackay's book on inference which is free online. I have no affiliation to Mackay, btw.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Companies are after two things:
1 develop hardware first and then make sure that hardware is supported by the spec so they win the time to market race.
2 make sure as much IP as possible for whatever standard is approved. Remember this is not IP as in "protocol" IP but implementation IP. The idea is to make sure that you have the best way to implement some given algorithm to support the standard. So for example a decoding algorithm may go into the patent "pool" but the best underlying hardware implementation is what the company wants the IP for. That way everybody else has to waste time finding away around it.
Strangely I think it's the combat over 2 that usually undermines 1.
A proper standard that makes life easy for the rest of us is a casualty of these efforts. This is why the other posters in this thread are right. You should wait as long as you can possibly stand to buy hardware. It just supports this behavior.
Absolute statements are never true
On my list of things to be sad for, this one ins't very high. Maybe I'll get to it afterI die. No promises, I only have eternity to deal with every other item on the list.
Despite expanding the acronym once, and linking to the organisation, the article manages to spell it incorrectly 3 times out of 4.
It's CSIRO, you numbnuts!
Also, IIRC, the CSIRO patents referred to pre-date any work on 802.11n, and their reluctance to release the patents for use by the WiFi consortium was due to the fact that they were still involved in outstanding suits and countersuits with IBM, Dell, HP, Microsoft, Netgear, Buffalo, etc. When all that was cleared up / dropped, CSIRO agreed to sign off on the LoA.
Short timeline here, at the bottom of the page.
What part of "a well regulated militia" do you not understand?
Since when does HBO cut for commercial breaks?
Who cares about wireless N or even G for that matter? When one uses any decent level of encryption you get 1/10th the throughput advertised. Seems pointless to me. Once I can get 50Mbit/s with a decent level of encryption then I'll bother spending money to upgrade. Yes, there are ways around this with ssh tunnels and such but that's silly, IMO.
Both AES and RC4 encryption is handled in hardware. I'm not sure what routers you've been using but I've never seen more than a 0-5% decrease in performance with encryption enabled.