1Gbps Optical Wireless Network Might Replace Wi-Fi

Mark.JUK writes "Pennsylvania State University has developed a new method of indoor Optical Wireless network that does not require a line-of-sight and runs at speeds of 1Gbps+. The system uses a high-powered laser diode — a device that converts electricity into light — as the optical transmitter and an avalanche photo diode — a device that converts light to electricity — as the receiver. The light bounces off the walls and is picked up by the receiver. Traditional radio frequency systems (Wi-Fi , WiMAX etc.) do not require line of sight transmission, but can pass through some substances and so present a security problem. Light, in a room without windows, will not escape the room, improving security."

Comments

stop closing that door

[weirdcrashingnoises]

it's interrupting my downloads!

Re:stop closing that door

[ionix5891]

dont look at the data-stream with remaining eye

Re:stop closing that door

[Anonymous Coward]

my thoughts exactly! kudos

Re:stop closing that door

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

Stop opening my door! The download is done!!

Re:stop closing that door

[Anonymous Coward]

Stop taking the notebook into the bathroom.

Or, you could just use cables

[ClosedSource]

This is only going to work in the small area that the laser can get to, so cables might be a better solution.

Re:Or, you could just use cables

[itzdandy]

If you considered this an open-air fiber optic cable (minus the fiber and the cable) then there may be a cost benefit over cables. Each cable requires infrastruction from jacks, in-wall cables, switch ports, etc while a whole room optical wireless could use a single switch port. Also consider that the price of these components could be very low. Diodes are typically not very expensive and a diode->serial USB could be made very cheaply though would not be gigabit speeds.

I think that for basic connectivity wireless is 'good enough' but this optical setup would certainly be more secure considering. Also consider that optical transmissions dont follow the same rules as microwave transmissions you could use as much of the band as you like to increase speeds even more.

Re:Or, you could just use cables

[TheRaven64]

If the hand-off is fast then it could be good. You'll need a base station in each room, but at that speed you can just mount them on door frames with an endpoint in each room and they can relay between the rooms.

Re:Or, you could just use cables

[mindstrm]

You'd have little sensors, just like little antennae in wifi... but, say a call-center floor. Instead of running Cat5 everywhere, you just put a few transmitters and receivers around... possibly built into the monitors, and everything "just works"

Re:Or, you could just use cables

[eiapoce]

Get ready to buy telescopes to steal neighbor's internet!!!!

Re:Or, you could just use cables

[hedwards]

It depends what you're wanting it for. This has tremendous potential in areas like NY City and Tokyo where there's enough population density that traditional wireless is hard to do. Even here in a relatively sparsely populated part of Seattle, there's something like 8 access points in use at most times. The added security would be a bonus, just pull down black out curtains when you want to block it completely rather than mostly.

But you still get the mobility to move around the room. I suppose in the future you could even get a mesh set up as well for going room to room.

Re:Or, you could just use cables

[CastrTroy]

We already tried this. It was called irda. That's right. Infra red data transfer. Palm pilots used to support it back in the day. A lot of laptops had it also. It wasn't a bad thing. About the same speed as a serial port, which was the standard back then anyway. If you need 1 GBPS speeds, and you have to be in the same room, you might as well use cables. That way, you can get 1 GBPS x Number of cables, whereas things travelling over the electromagnetic spectrum seem to always have problems with interference, so the bandwidth has to be shared. I can't think of too many devices where I would need 1 GBPS transfer speeds, but where I couldn't bother with a cable.

Re:Or, you could just use cables

[DJRumpy]

I had the same though, but given the nature of this technology, you only need an optical signal repeater or an electrical connection (might breath new life into PowerLine adapters).

From TFA:
"Multiple sensors could allow the light signal to pass from room to room or even from floor to floor. The system could also be set up to convert the signal to electricity, transfer it to another location and change it back to light. Optical systems can also operate in locations where radio frequency transmission would interfere with other equipment."

Useless for me

[aBaldrich]

I like to shut the door of my room while watching my movies and other stuff.

Re:Useless for me

[arndawg]

You mean LOCK the door so your mom won't walk in on you while watching porn?

Re:Useless for me

[dotgain]

Well done! You got the joke!

Re:Useless for me

[mister_playboy]

My room doesn't have a door, you insensitive clod! :(

Re:Useless for me

[SteelFist]

My room doesn't have a door, you insensitive clod! :(

Caught one too many times, I take it?

Re:Useless for me

[santiagodraco]

Neither does your mom's! Shazam!

Re:Useless for me

[maxume]

Where exactly is the door on your mom?

Re:Useless for me

[d'fim]

If you don't know, then you've just ruined all your potential jokes about having had sex with her.

Headaches...

[venkateshkumar99]

If the LASER is anywhere in the visual spectrum, the whole house could become a perpetual disco ;)

Re:Headaches...

[itzdandy]

or seizure generator!

Re:Headaches...

[darkpixel2k]

or seizure generator!

Only if you use bittorrent...

Re:Headaches...

[Shatrat]

It won't be. It will either be 1310nm or 1550nm.
I doubt that anything lower than 1310 would be used due to increased attenuation of higher frequencies.
By the way 1310 is more than double the wavelength that you can see with your eyes, and if this thing is made with APD receivers then it will not be cheap.

Re:Headaches...

[glarbl_blarbl]

...if this thing is made with APD receivers then it will not be cheap.

No technology is cheap when it's first mass produced. I came across a Computer Shopper from 1990 awhile back, 286 systems for $2000!

Re:Headaches...

[Hadlock]

Why wouldn't you use something in the visible spectrum? It seems that red lasers would work equally well. red lasers are insanely cheap (petco: $2.99, probably $0.30 in bulk). There's not really anything stopping someone from developing this sort of thing using red lasers and some sort of receiving eye. It's already been proven that you could intercept someone's network information by reading the data off of someone's network card TX LED. I don't know about the lifespan of 5w green lasers, but I bet homebrewers could develop some sort of 10 mile point to point link at night no problem.

Re:Headaches...

[sillybilly]

Persistence of vision kicks in above 25 Hz, and some people can still sense an 85-100 Hz refresh on CRT monitors with their periferal vision, but anything vibrating at a higher frequency is oblivious to the eyes. I'm guessing stuff transmitting in the GBit/s range is operating near 1GHz or close to it, which is well above the 100 Hz flicker you can see. If anything, the laser hitting you in the eyes, especially if it's infrared and invisible, might be the problem.
One of the issues becomes the data interference from multipath reflection, that used to be a problem with nondirectional rabbit ear antennas in television. The speed of light is 3x10^8 m/s, the frequency we talk about is 1x10^9 /s, so that gives a wavelength for the modulated signal of 0.3 m, or about 1 foot. So path differences on this order or greater cause interference - light reflected off the far corner carrying the old databit comes in 10 nanoseconds later than the light reflecting from the nearby wall, carrying the current databit. This of course can be avoided if the path is restricted, such as aiming to a white spot on a wall, and then focusing a telescope with full magnification zoom onto that spot. This should be cheaper than running cables, however people walking through the room blocking line of sight have to be considered, and the ease of knocking the computer table/devices out of alignment. But a homing-zooming type wide viewfield webcam setup that finds you 10 different dots on the wall, and tells you to pick the one talking to you in software, then zooming in onto that dot, and keeping homed in onto it, that could be done. Or something transparent and automated, such as in a netcafe, you get assigned a new ID/key combo, and you type that in, and the computer goes from dot to dot, and shoots a reply dot 2 cm to the left of the dot, to try to establish handshake, and tries each dot iteratively til it finds the one belonging to it.
I think even now there is a way to listen to people having conversations by the modulation the window puts onto a reflected infrared laser light. There is already technology that extracts info from laser dots on a wall.
Still, software can do something about weeding out some of the multipath noise. Or even just focus on a small area of the wall, but broadcast the reply. In a spatially broadcast and not limited to a dot reply world everyone shares the same channel, and from the encoded info the master router station has to decipher which packet came from who. Less bandwidth, but also less hardware, as the router has to have a laser aiming for each of the channels onto a separate spot on the wall. Also, I haven't talked about repeaters, that go around doors and rooms and staircases, possibly being blocked by people walking there. With staircases pulling a wire through the floor might be more straightforward. Or a combo - dot on the wall within a room, and short cabling intra-floor or throught he walls.

Re:Headaches...

[Shatrat]

APDs have been mass produced in large volume for at least a decade for telecom. They are still much more expensive than a PIN style detector.
Unlike the PIN they have a feedback loop to shut off or reset the detector after each bit since each bit detected creates an avalanche of stimulated emission. They're pretty complex tiny little thingies which require exotic materials.

Re:Headaches...

[Mr2001]

No technology is cheap when it's first mass produced. I came across a Computer Shopper from 1990 awhile back, 286 systems for $2000!

Indeed, these days you can get a 286 system for almost 50% less!

Re:Headaches...

[Shatrat]

I'm going on what I know about fiber, but I assume the same holds true for air but with higher values of attenuation and maybe a shift up or down in frequency.
Basically at frequencies of 1310 nanometers and lower your attenuation is mainly due to scattering.
Your photon will scatter off any imperfection in the medium larger than it's wavelength so short wavelengths scatter a lot. This continues in fiber up to around 1600 NM where the main cause of attenuation becomes absorbtion of the photon by the atoms it is passing through.
Another problem with this tech that I didn't think of is dispersion. Dispersion is what makes multimode fiber only good up to around 500 meters. Multimode fiber is going to produce a lot less modal dispersion than something with as many modes as a room. I recommend reading up on single-mode and multimode fiber and modal and chromatic dispersion. It's pretty cool stuff from a geeky perspective.

Re:Headaches...

[sillybilly]

That brings the question to mind as to why regular wifi does not suffer from multipath reflection? It probably does.

Re:Headaches...

[Anonymous Coward]

You can possibly read the TX light on a modem. But on modern Ethernet the speeds are much too high to read individual bits. Plus there's no guarantee that the light mean "bit" as opposed to "packet" or "TX power on", and the later two don't leak much information.

Re:Headaches...

[CastrTroy]

I remember our family got or first 386 system and it cost at least $2000. I think the only reason we got one was because my step-father's employee (a mine) had a deal where they would sell you a computer and just take a little off your paycheck every month. I think half the town got a computer out of that deal. These computers were good, but definitely not top of the line or anything. Now you can get a computer for $500, that will basically do anything that anybody will want to do, apart from playing some of the more resource intensive games.

Re:Headaches...

[zill]

If it's outside the visible spectrum then it has the potential to cause permanent eye injuries even at low power levels (class 1 and 2).

When a visible laser hazard hits the eye, reflex will protect the eye and limit the exposure level to under 10 milliseconds. Invisible spectrum laser on the other hand, makes it impossible for the reflex system to kick in and thus you slowly lose your sight without knowing why (contrary to popular belief laser damage to the eyes does not cause pain at all).

I, for one, am very scared of things that could blind me without my knowledge until after I'm blind.

Re:Headaches...

[Shatrat]

Yeah, I wish I had a cheap digital camera that picked up wavelengths from 1000 to 2000 nanometers.
I bet if I walked into any datacenter or telecom collo it would light up like christmas.

The Asian Advantage.

[Rothron the Wise]

So if I want wireless in my whole apartment I guess rice paper partitions is the way to go.

wait...

[charlener]

what if you open the door? Will internet leak out of the room?

I suppose a double door or, more entertainingly, a revolving door, could help with this...

Re:wait...

[Bromskloss]

what if you open the door? Will internet leak out of the room?

I suppose a double door or, more entertainingly, a revolving door, could help with this...

Have a look at this. We're intercepting an electromagnetic signal in the terahertz range and it seem to have some kind of beating. I think we just might have found a pulsar!

Ah, and is it Useful?

[Oxford_Comma_Lover]

> Light, in a room without windows, will not escape the room, improving security.

Although at a cost? This system might be useful for Universities that need to provide wireless to a hundred computers in the same room, but it would be almost useless for homes and such, where one of the big reasons to go wireless is to avoid the need to rewire the house. To use a 1 Gbps signal, you'd need a hard-line to the room.

The other point is that for most applications, it's simply unnecessary to improve over the speed of modern wireless.

Still, there are a few niches where this would be useful, and it sounds like a really fun idea to develop.

Re:Ah, and is it Useful?

[phantomfive]

Still, there are a few niches where this would be useful, and it sounds like a really fun idea to develop

I've been trying to think of the niches, and the obvious one is in security applications, but I don't see that as being any more secure than encrypted wireless. Is there really a use for this? Nice to know it's possible, I guess.

Re:Ah, and is it Useful?

[93 Escort Wagon]

I don't particularly see the usefulness of this tech for single-room "computer labs" - running cable is not difficult and will almost certainly be far cheaper. Also, you're not really all that concerned with the visual appearance of cables in a computer lab.

Not to mention that (based on my group's experience anyway) university computer labs tend to be theft magnets, so you'd have the issue with people wanting to walk off with your optical router and/or the optical receivers.

As far as security goes... all of our computer labs have windows, so the signal wouldn't be confined to the room anyway.

Re:Ah, and is it Useful?

[mindstrm]

Absolutely - take a call center.. or any cube farm. No need to run ethernet cable everywhere... just some cheap well-placed sensors, and, unlike wifi, the leakage can be better controlled.

So the advantages would be

1) less leakage to other areas
2) speed

Re:Ah, and is it Useful?

[Flwyd]

Also conferences with a could hundred livebloggers in an auditorium.

Re:Ah, and is it Useful?

[nine-times]

The other point is that for most applications, it's simply unnecessary to improve over the speed of modern wireless.

There's still video. IIRC, uncompressed 1080p/60 is roughly 3Gbps. Now you can still stream video without hitting 3Gbps, but then you theoretically lose quality and also you need more power to decompress the video stream on the other end.

Even ignoring the aspect of real-time streaming, people are buying/storing video at home, which even highly compressed can be several hundred megabytes per hour; if you want to copy those video files from one computer to another, you'll want some speed.

Re:Ah, and is it Useful?

[eiapoce]

The other point is that for most applications, it's simply unnecessary to improve over the speed of modern wireless.

Of course, also 640K ought to be enough for anybody!

Re:Ah, and is it Useful?

[Anonymous Coward]

just put mirrors at 45deg angles in the corners of hallways. Problem solved

Re:Ah, and is it Useful?

[sillybilly]

Is there really a use for this? Light is the future. Light will eventually be able to carry channels with 10 Gbit/s, 100 Tbit/s, 100 exabit/s, and so on, which will not be possible to do on the frequencies that Wifi uses, per channel, unless technology shows up to resolve a certain set of frequencies into even smaller individual subdivisions, such as 900.000001 MHz, 900.000002 MHz, and successfully carries uninterfering data on each of those frequencies. Even GHz microwave is quite directional and severely decaying with distance compared to say VHF bands, so whatever issues you face with light, as you have to increase frequencies to carry data faster, all your electromagnetic waves will have issues similar to issues with light.

Re:Ah, and is it Useful?

[Anonymous Coward]

I bet some dumbass comes up with an idea to improve signal by upping the amps on the diode and we'll all die.

Re:Ah, and is it Useful?

[tftp]

A cube farm usually has power, phone and Ethernet coming into each cube. Ethernet is usually routed from a switch somewhere in the back room. The link is very simple, and if it fails you just test the cable with a pocket tester or replace the switch.

Use of optical LAN may require *more* wiring, not less, depending on how many APs you need, and AP's cables have to climb walls if that's where your lasers are. You also need to feed power to them somehow, using PoE or from wall sockets. If something goes wrong you have several possible reasons, and the investigation will take longer, and it will be not as easy to replace a laser AP that is on the ceiling or high on the wall. Some faults can be caused by shadows, people passing by, and other problems that Ethernet is free of.

Leakage to other areas is not affected (unless you talk WiFi which isn't that popular in cube farms) because there are cables that go to laser APs anyway. The 1 Gbps speed is already provided over CAT6 Ethernet, and even if you push it to 10 Gbps somehow it won't make any difference because your SharePoint server still takes 10 seconds to display a page, and your Exchange server still takes minutes to "synchronize folders" because it is obviously such a monumental job.

Considering the cost of laser APs, and of their counterparts in each computer, and additional wiring, and additional complexity, a simple Ethernet cable laid by a lowly tech once, working forever and requiring no power, looks like a great deal.

Re:Ah, and is it Useful?

[Anonymous Coward]

and so on, which will not be possible to do on the frequencies that Wifi uses, per channel, unless technology shows up to resolve a certain set of frequencies into even smaller individual subdivisions, such as 900.000001 MHz, 900.000002 MHz, and successfully carries uninterfering data on each of those frequencies

That's not how it works. If you have a signal that ONLY occupies 900.000000 - 900.0000001 MHz, it can only carry a tenth of what a signal at 900.00001 MHz can. The smaller the slice of band width (hint hint -- the width of the band of spectrum), the less band width (information carrying capacity) you get.

Re:Ah, and is it Useful?

[binaryspiral]

We're looking for such a solution for a lecture room that also is used for online testing. Do we deploy three wireless AP's to handle the load of sixty to seventy wireless laptops or just one of these optical devices? Then account for modification or addition of optical wireless gear to each of the laptops and my costs are now far beyond that of the three APs.

Pretty cool solution - but not very practical for most situations.

It's an answer looking for a question.

Re:Ah, and is it Useful?

[sillybilly]

Duh. That's a nice logical catch for dilettantes. I was thinking of a situation where the resolving power between the different frequencies was absolute. As if you got 900 Mhz worth of ticks or wavetrains that can be say amplitude modulated both on the 900.00001 channel and the 900.00002 channel, and the two channels "don't interfere." I was thinking of modulation as a simple on off of a wavetrain, staying at the assigned frequency. But sine-waves are not digital square waves, and are not that simple as on off. With a sine wave cut a single wave-train out, and you suddenly got a Fourier series with multiple frequencies on your hand. In fact you can't do anything to sine waves without changing frequencies. And sine waves are the pure form of waves that travel, square waves are simply Fourier composites of sine waves, and will quickly break up into components. The fact is that you simply can't modulate a signal without consuming nearby frequencies. It's not very intuitive, but this is what escaped me. Even with AM modulation, that seemingly only changes the amplitude of the sine wave, but not the frequency, there are two sidebands, dependent on the modulation frequency. If the modulation frequency is a 1 KHz pure sine tone, the AM sidebands would be at 899.999 and 900.001 MHz. Alas, the frequency of the modulating signal that can be put onto these 900.00001 channels is 100 Hz. The kind of digital signals such a 100 Hz modulation can carry is on the oder of 100 baud, very slow. So yeah, you can't gain bandwidth by talking both on the 900.00000001 MHz frequency channel and the 900.00000002 MHz channel, because any meaningful modulation of the signal changes the frequency far outside those tight ranges. Duh. I used to have this concept in my head when skimming through books, but until now I never really had my own rig where I'd try to do something cool like this, to try to get more bandwidth, even as a thought experiment, and get this concept of you can't hard etched into my memory. It's kind of like trying to construct a perpetuum mobile - the laws of physics forbid it, and if you think you got a way around it, like so many people before you thought, think again. That 2nd kind of perpetuum mobile, that extracts energy from a single heat reservoir, such as the air, or the sea, though, is still a bit up in the air, and may one day be created by a sufficiently efficient Maxwell's demon. The theory has already been expanded to include information itself in the concept of entropy, and to show that none of the Maxwell demons/nanotech Brownian ratchets can be efficient enough.

Of course often the room *does* have windows.

[mrjb]

It's only more secure if it implements the same security measures (encryption, key based access) as current wireless (okay, if the light is infrared it may be stopped by windows.

I don't think it will be a big contender for wireless though. The killer feature of wireless is that you don't have to drill holes in your walls to have network connectivity in the entire house. But if the network is optical, it will essentially be limited to the room where the base station is. Personally, I'd stick to my trusty old wires then. Reliable, secure, fast and low-cost, what more do you want?

Re:Of course often the room *does* have windows.

[that this is not und]

The killer feature of wireless is that you don't have to drill holes in your walls to have network connectivity in the entire house.

Wait and see. There will probably be a growth industry based around hanging mirrors at corners to transfer and reflect the light.

Re:Of course often the room *does* have windows.

[Anonymous Coward]

What more do I want?

Which technology uses the least power?

Re:Of course often the room *does* have windows.

[The J Kid]

What about doors and stairs?

Re:Of course often the room *does* have windows.

[hedwards]

Heh, just like wireless it'll handle those better than Windows. *ducks out of the way*

security

[wizardforce]

How many homes don't have windows? Of those homes, how often is it that there is a need to connect with a computer inside a closed room? Any system that can connect to a computer inside a closed room can also be connected to from outside the house. Any system that can't be connected to from outside the house also can not connect to a system with the door shut. The number of times the signal can bounce off walls would significantly affect the range of the system. So while a direct path between floors of a house may be 10 meters, the path through the house from the top floor going around everything that is opaque to the system might be 50-60 meters and quite possibly out of range.

Re:security

[Anonymous Coward]

In the Netherlands, all furnished rooms are required to have windows - by law. For each 10 square feet of floor, there has to be 1 square foot of window. This applies for houses as well as office buildings. So this wouldn't work here. Though it would be much easier to eavesdrop on the neighbors.

Re:security

[imroy]

How many homes don't have windows?

I may be wrong on this, but I seem to remember our Australian building code requiring a minimum amount of ventilation for any room that will be occupied by people, and the same may apply in other countries. So you have a few options - usually a window or an exhaust fan. People tend to favour windows (note the lower case 'w'). So I'm guessing there aren't many rooms in homes that don't have windows (again, lower case 'w'), for strictly legal reasons.

Re:security

[antirelic]

Improved security is a non-starter. Sure, you gain the advantage of being able to seal in the light, but light that escapes can be detected and captured at a much greater distance. Unless they are using some form of signal shaping form of encryption, which I doubt would be a standard consumer grade application, its better to talk about what advantages can be gained over WiFi.

My first thought would be background noise. If this wireless optical network can operate on wavelengths that are not commonly found in a living area, then its big advantage would be interference. Currently, radio frequencies in nearly all ranges are becoming greatly over used, from home mimo networks, do it yourself UAV's, and emergency responder networks. The major advantage of optical would be the lack of congestion. Also being able to more easily focus an optical communication path could also be another advantage. Radio is very leaky and easily disrupted and scattered by a plethora of different things. Light is much more reliable (though it also has its environmental enemies).

Yeah, sounds like a nice alternative to crowded wireless medium.

Re:security

[tomhudson]

all furnished rooms are required to have windows - by law. For each 10 square feet of floor, there has to be 1 square foot of window.

That's a LOT of Windows dvds. You could plaster a wall with them ...

Re:security

[sillybilly]

How many homes don't have windows? you can always put up a curtain for privacy reasons over the window.

Re:security

[Anonymous Coward]

That might be the range WITHOUT the 10o KiloWatt amplifier hooked up. The advantage of the amp is that it doubles as a disco ball.

Re:security

[kWahab]

How many homes don't have windows?

My home doesn't have windows! it's full of penguins though..

Re:security

[DigitalCrackPipe]

The only rooms in my house without windows are the bathrooms. So, if I want to get a wireless signal from one side of the bathroom to the other, this technology would be great. Otherwise, not so much.

Naturally

[Junta]

Light, in a room without windows, will not escape the room, improving security.

As usual, Windows makes networking less secure, why am I not surprised.

Re:Naturally

[syockit]

I was about to say "I see what you did there" to the submitter. Well, it seems someone else pointed it out in a different manner.

Windows

[Anonymous Coward]

> Traditional radio frequency systems (Wi-Fi , WiMAX etc.) do not require line of sight transmission, but can pass through some substances and so present a security problem. Light, in a room without windows, will not escape the room, improving security.

Geeze, there you guys go again, always blaming windows for being so insecure!

Doors are a part of the problem, too, you know!

Re:Windows

[TheRaven64]

And Gates!

Is this part of the EF spectrum

[rescendent]

I always thought radio frequency was light...

Re:Is this part of the EF spectrum

[Anonymous Coward]

"EF" is not a radio spectrum band. Ask again with your acronym expanded maybe?

Re:Is this part of the EF spectrum

[hedwards]

It's Electro Magnetic Radiation. Generally people don't refer to parts too far beyond the visible spectrum as light as people aren't able to see them or use them directly or perceive them as light.

Good for site-to-site

[arndawg]

Seams like a good way to connect multiple buildings when you don't have any cabled infrastructure between them.

Re:Good for site-to-site

[tomhudson]

Seams (sic) like a good way to connect multiple buildings when you don't have any cabled infrastructure between them

Don't get much rain or snow or dust there, do you?

"Hey boss, I found out why the Internet went down. A bird shat on the optics."

Doubles as strobe light

[Culture20]

For awesome dance club effects.

Windows = A security hazard

[Arancaytar]

Light, in a room without windows, will not escape the room, improving security."

Well duh, everyone knows that avoiding Windows improves your security.

Re:Windows = A security hazard

[Atmchicago]

I was going to say, preventing outdoor light from entering the room is just another way of getting security through obscurity! We all knew in the back of our minds why working in dark basements was a good idea...

Re:Windows = A security hazard

[Anonymous Coward]

explains why linux freaks all live in windows-less home basements of their parents, then?

Re:Windows = A security hazard

[Hurricane78]

So THAT is why geeks live in the basement! For security!
From crackers... From sunlight... From girls! ;)

Re:Windows = A security hazard

[Arancaytar]

Exactly! Girls have cooties.

Re:Windows = A security hazard

[ErkDemon]

Of course, if you want to ensure that the optical links between your devices are more secure, you could try networking your room with a collection of long, thin, hollow, flexible cylindrical light-guards. A system of tubes, if you will.

Wrong on one count

[dreamchaser]

The other point is that for most applications, it's simply unnecessary to improve over the speed of modern wireless.

Uh huh, and 640K should be enough for anyone, and there's no reason to go to broadband when a regular old analog modem is sufficient for most applications, and...well you probably get my point by now.

Re:Wrong on one count

[Darkness404]

...And does anyone ever get internet connections even -close- to the 54 MB/Sec of wireless G? If you are streaming media throughout a home its nice, but most people don't use their wi-fi for that, they use it for internet where the primary bottleneck is the internet service, not the wireless router.

Re:Wrong on one count

[twidarkling]

I use my Wi-Fi for that. If it's late, and I'm tired, I'll watch a movie on my laptop off my NAS, so then I can just close the laptop when I'm finally tired enough to drop off.

However, that means this new optical wireless is useless to me. The only application for home use I could see is keeping multiple devices connected to some data server in a home theatre set up, to minimize cables. I think this is something not even for enthusiasts, but for very specific situations, so Wi-Fi isn't going to be "replaced." Misleading headline at best, eh?

Re:Wrong on one count

[dreamchaser]

I use wifi for multiple devices on my internal LAN; I wasn't even thinking about Internet. As for bandwidth, I get about 30 mb/sec now and I'm sure that will just keep increasing as well.

My point was there's no such thing as a technology that should not be improved upon for future needs.

Re:Wrong on one count

[TheRaven64]

640KB is enough for some people. 6.4MB is enough for a few more, 64MB for a lot more, 640MB for a lot of people. Each increment increases the things you can do. 64KB is enough for editing text. 640KB for rich text and small images. 6.4MB for larger images. 64MB for large raw images. 640MB for SD video. 6.4GB for HD video. 64GB for volumetric 3D images (the visible human dataset is around 40GB). 640GB for volumetric 3D movies. Are there things that 640GB isn't enough for? Almost certainly, but the number of people wanting to do them is relatively small. Far more people want to edit text than want to edit volumetric data.

In terms of network speed, 802.11n is fast enough to stream HD video. BluRay movies are at most 50Mb/s, while 802.11n has a theoretical speed of 300Mb/s and can get 50Mb/s in the real world quite happily. Are there uses where it's not fast enough? Sure, but not many yet. Eventually it probably will become common to do things that make 802.11n seem slow, but it isn't yet. The only reason why GigE was deployed in a lot of places was that it was as cheap as 100Mbit Ethernet.

I moved from 100Mb/s wired Ethernet to 802.11g because, for most uses, the convenience of not having to use a wire was more useful than the extra speed. From there, I'd rather move to 802.11n and have one access point for the house than 1Gb/s optical networking and need one in every room.

Re:Wrong on one count

[Mad Merlin]

...And does anyone ever get internet connections even -close- to the 54 MB/Sec of wireless G?

That's megabits, not megabytes. And no, you usually get perhaps half of the stated maximum speed with wireless, for wireless G that means ~25 Mbit/s, or ~3M/s, at best.

Re:Wrong on one count

[Anonymous Coward]

...And does anyone ever get internet connections even -close- to the 54 MB/Sec of wireless G? If you are streaming media throughout a home its nice, but most people don't use their wi-fi for that, they use it for internet where the primary bottleneck is the internet service, not the wireless router.

In many countries you can get 100 Mb/s Internet connections, which is about twice the 54 Mb/s (nee MB/s) connection speed of 802.11g. Of course with 802.11n that may help things a bit.

Though you're right, most people (sadly?) don't have that "problem".

Re:Wrong on one count

[Anonymous Coward]

54 Mbit/s can carry 12 Mbit/s up and 12 Mbit/down, maximum. Or 24Mbit/s down and nothing up. Up + down == 24 Mbit/s.

And at least my internet connection is 100 down / 100 up Mbit/s. So I'd need uh... 8x 54Mbit/s wireless routers and some '30' channels to get that kind of throughput.

Not that 11n is much better. Would need 3-4 of those, too!

Re:Wrong on one count

[dgatwood]

Either way, IIRC, the average broadband speed is still single-digit Mbps. So for most of us, Wi-Fi can still trivially saturate our upstream link.

Re:Wrong on one count

[mindstrm]

Exactly - wiring up an office building with Cat5 costs a fair bundle... and is fairly inflexible. Wireless is flexible, but too slow and leaks.

Give me a wireless signal that's easier to keep from leaking out of the room, and that operates closer to GigE, and it's an instant win all over the place... maybe not in your house, but in any business.

Re:Wrong on one count

[ElectricTurtle]

Dude... what is your angle? This is like the 3rd two line post I've seen of you in this topic cheer-leading this. I'm starting to smell astroturf. Do you work for Pennsylvania State?

Re:Wrong on one count

[selven]

Back in 2000, 64 MB was the limit. Many people wanted to edit text and rich text, many people wanted to edit images, few people wanted to edit large raw images. Very few people cared about movies stored on a computer. From that mindset, adding more MB seemed useless. Now, in 2010, the limit got pushed up, with many people editing images, many people having movies and very few people having volumetric 3D movies. Adding GB seems pointless, but if we go up to 6.4 TB, people will start storing full high-definition virtual worlds on their computers. Humanity is marked by its ingenuity, we'll always find a way to take advantage of more memory/processor power/internet speed.

Re:Wrong on one count

[tomhudson]

And no, you usually get perhaps half of the stated maximum speed with wireless,

So switch to wireless n - I transferred 100 gigabytes from my laptop 2 days ago (cleaning up the laptop) and I got the full 100mb/s speed - and that's over a 3-year-old dlink b/g/n I picked up on sale for $50.00. I seriously doubt that anyone was out there trying to crack the encryption, and if they were, I could have always used ssh.

If you're only getting half-speed, try switching channels. Also, n is a lot better at rejecting interference, etc.

Re:Wrong on one count

[tomhudson]

Not that 11n is much better. Would need 3-4 of those, too!

Not really. I get 100mbps sustained throughput on my wireless n - I had to transfer 100 gigs from my laptop to my server, and it was just as fast as if I had done it with the ethernet cable plugged in.

And please don't say "well, you have to be close to get that sort of performance". Remember, they're talking about using this in the same room - if you can't get full speed from your wireless n in the same room, then either:

1. something is not configured properly;
2. you bought one of those crappy netbooks that doesn't have the guts to do sustained high-speed transfer (puny cpu, crap disk i/o, cheap components, etc);
3. you're running Windows and your anti-virus is a bottleneck - in which case, welcome to yet *another* hidden Microsoft tax.

... and I have NO difficulty with streaming big files from another room, which this doesn't even allow without mirrors or some other way to bounce the signal.

Re:Wrong on one count

[GigsVT]

Having an opinion or a even conflict of interest is not "astroturf".

Re:Wrong on one count

[Mad Merlin]

I'm not interested in downgrading to wireless n. I'm quite happy with gigabit ethernet with which I actually get the full gigabit of wire speed.

Re:Wrong on one count

[Skal Tura]

and does anyone ever get anything even -close- to the 54MB/Sec of what wireless can do? ;)

Btw, 48Mbps connections are available widely in Finland now. And don't get me even started with Sweden or Japan ...

Re:Wrong on one count

[KingMotley]

Whoops, not here in Chicago (not exactly a small market). Comcast offers 100Mb/s down, 30Mb/s up (burst). More than enough to saturate all but the most stable 54g network.

Re:Wrong on one count

[Skal Tura]

LAN is always internal, it is called Local Area Network afterall ;)

and i doubt you are getting 30mb/sec on wireless, more like 30Mbps, and not 300Mbps ;) In my experience, wireless is very unreliable, i don't use it even for LAN due to unreliability and slow speeds. At our office, people using WIFI, when they complain about slow internet access or local dev server not working, or other wierd network problems, it's 100.0% of the time about the wireless. And we use highend hardware for that (good enough for it to work as unreliably 4 floors down in a brick building)

Re:Wrong on one count

[TBoon]

64MB for large raw images. 640MB for SD video.

I would dread doing anything involving RAW on a system with 64MB RAM. On the other hand, I quite happily edited DV-video on 256 MB RAM (or less?) about a decade ago...

Re:Wrong on one count

[ElectricTurtle]

I was using 'do you work for' in the true astroturfing sense. I was literally asking if he were employed for the purpose of swaying public opinion with no or false disclosure. My statement may have been ambiguous if taken out of context, and could have included those people who work for companies who happen to have positive opinions of their company's product(s) but are not tasked with spreading positive opinions by their employer. However, the individual in question has made no disclosure, and so consequent to a suspicious pattern of behavior, I am asking him to confirm or deny his potential relationship, if any, with an interested party, whereupon he could, even if related, at least deny that he has been employed for the express purpose of improving public opinion, which would be the definition of astroturf.

In summation, do not presume that I do not know what I'm doing simply because I began in inquiry with 'dude'.

Re:Wrong on one count

[bjelkeman]

This is my internet connection at about US$40/month. Advertised speed is 100 mbps and achieved speed is around 80 mbps, Stockholm, Sweden. So yes.

Re:Wrong on one count

[FlyingBishop]

You can use this for transmitting everything, and it could remove the need for cords to connect Display to computer, and does not suffer from the same regulatory difficulties that Radio-band wireless does, so it could be a very good bluetooth replacement, especially given the wide variety of data it can transfer, it might replace USB/eSATA for some applications.

Re:Wrong on one count

[Anonymous Coward]

I get 100mbps sustained throughput on my wireless n

100 millibits per second isn't very fast.

Re:Wrong on one count

[dreamchaser]

When there are one or two people using wireless (my wife and I) then it works like a charm. We have no problems with our mobile devices or the wireless connected PS3.

Blindness

[enriquevagu]

Erm....

"high-powered laser diode"

Doesn't it cause blindness? Isn't it the reason for fibers to have power sensing mechanisms that detect broken segments, for safety reasons?

Is this valid only for rooms without windows and without people?

The future of wireshark

[Johnny Grep]

Instead of packet sniffing, we'll be packet peeking.

HP used to sell a product like this

[Animats]

IR office networks were popular around 15 years ago. HP used to have a "NetBeame" IR access point product line. (There's one on eBay for $49.) There's Linux support for IRNet. The Infrared Data Association is already promoting gigabit IrDA.

The concept of diffuse IR networking works fine, but it never really caught on. You can usually get a signal with one bounce, typically off the ceiling, but more than one bounce and it tends not to work. You don't get any useful diffraction around obstacles at IR frequencies, so shadows are a problem. If you populate the ceiling with little IR domes, it works fine, and I've seen that done, but it's obsolete technology now.

Re:HP used to sell a product like this

[atamido]

The opposite of this has actually been used with casinos and hospitals for tracking things in rooms. Employees and/or patients wear IR transmitting badges or wristbands that transmit a burst every so often, which are picked up by receivers in every room. It's a simple method for tracking people's movements over time. It's a good way to find out about employee theft in a casino. Also, for example, they would place wristband transmitters around an infant's wrist. If someone tried to cut off the band (so as to kidnap the infant) it would immediately begin transmitting at max power, alerting the staff.

Of course this was probably 15 years ago that I can confirm it being used, so I don't know that it's still being used. It's not a bad idea either at the transmitters/receivers are easily room specific, so it's probably much simpler than trying to triangulate with signal strength.

Re:HP used to sell a product like this

[tomhudson]

Also, for example, they would place wristband transmitters around an infant's wrist. If someone tried to cut off the band (so as to kidnap the infant) it would immediately begin transmitting at max power, alerting the staff.

1. Cut of the kids hand. Nothing says you're a serious kidnapper more than a severed body part.
2. Tin foil. It's not just to keep Bill Gates from reading your brain waves any more.
3. Cut off one kid's band and toss it out the window - in the confusion nobody will notice you swiping a different kid.

For every security solution, there's a way to beat it that's cheap, simple, and effective.

Re:HP used to sell a product like this

[sillybilly]

Why is it obsolete technology? I put lightbulbs/fluorescent/led up into little domes in the ceiling, and that's still not obsolete technology, so why not put IR repeaters up there too?

Re:HP used to sell a product like this

[sillybilly]

You could even make a lightbulb fixture/splitter with IRDA adapter/repeater on one end, lightbulb the other. I had a smoke alarm like that, with a lightbulb adaptor, but the rechargeable battery in it was a supercapacitor, and it was always too low a voltage very fast, and it would keep beeing every three minutes, unless you turned the light on, and it'd keep beeping for a while even after that. Really annoying. Should have had a 9V recheargable battery. But the same idea goes for an IR repeater, make it a light fixture, and please, supercaps go bad so fast, use a 9V rechargeable battery, even if it has to be bought separately.

Re:HP used to sell a product like this

[atamido]

The alerts also showed up if a transmitter didn't check in at its scheduled time, so simply swiping a kid or covering the emitter would alert people.

Of course, if you're willing to cut off an infant's hand, you might as well whack the person in the security room, or set off a bomb outside of the security room.

It's not meant to be a catch all, just a more casual deterrent. Sort of like the simple metal detectors in the airports a decade ago that would remind people to stow guns and knives in the check in luggage. (My brother has a funny story about going on a plane trip as a boy scout where one of the scouts in his group had a large knife confiscated off of his person. When they got to their destination the boy pulled out an identical large knife from his jacket. When asked by his friends why he didn't hand that one over when they took the first one, he innocently responded that they hadn't asked for it.)

Re:HP used to sell a product like this

[tomhudson]

The alerts also showed up if a transmitter didn't check in at its scheduled time, so simply swiping a kid or covering the emitter would alert people.

So disable a bunch of them (a little heat or a jab of current in the right place will do it) and people will get used to "damn - another false alarm!).

This is like the CCTV cameras all over Britain - they give a false sense of increased security.

Re:HP used to sell a product like this

[atamido]

I'm thinking the cameras recording you screwing with the bands might make for some trouble. And for that much exposure in the nursery, you'd need to be a nursery employee, which means there are easier ways to get a kid.

Although, I don't know what you're going on about. I was just pointing out that they were in use in at least one hospital. I can confirm that they caught a number of employee thefts in at least one casino, so they verifiably have some positive level of effectiveness. (Fun fact, the casino in question didn't really care about the employee theft as it was such a small drop in the bucket.)

now for iPad!

[the_fat_kid]

I smell a grant proposal
I think that they just strung together hot buzz words, Mad-Libs style
Wireless optical? what could be the problem with that?
I have a cordless monitor that I'd like to tell you about too...

Light cant pass thru walls

[nurb432]

Which makes its mostly useless for 99% of us, unless you run cables to repeaters everywhere, which sort of defeats the purpose.

And how well would it work outside? Not well i would imagine.

Re:Light cant pass thru walls

[yup2000]

since when can't lasers pass through walls!? :) Use a BIGGER lazer!

Re:Light cant pass thru walls

[Anonymous Coward]

IMMA CHARGIN MAH LAZER

Re:Light cant pass thru walls

[Anonymous Coward]

I kept pushing my cable into the wall and it couldn't penetrate it either ;]

Self interference

[AJWM]

I don't see how this can work at the speed they're claiming. 1+ Gbps means they're pulsing that light at sub-nanosecond intervals (or else doing something really amazing with frequency shifting, which I doubt). Since light travels less than a foot per nanosecond, if you're just bouncing it off the walls you're going to get echoes delayed by multiple pulse lengths and fractions of pulse lengths. Not a problem if the receiver is just seeing a single point, like in fiber, but how does that work in a room?

Re:Self interference

[jhfry]

Hmm... you don't see how it can work, so it must not work.

Perhaps they are using multiple light frequencies with multiple transmitters and receivers, each capable of only 100MB? Perhaps they simply know more than you do.

I would wager that they are doing something relatively new, or the technology would have existed already... so it's not all that surprising that you don't understand it.

Re:Self interference

[colinrichardday]

But where does the burden of proof lie?

Re:Self interference

[pclminion]

Yeah, we have no fucking idea how to deal with echoes. It's not like we have a cellular network that handles multi-path, selective fading, and moving transmitters... Light is a bit harder to modulate than radio frequency, but it's still just a wave, and we actually do have a few years (somewhere around 100) of experience with modulation schemes.

The idea that you think they are pulsing a little light on and off at 1 GHz made me laugh out loud.

Re:Self interference

[Anonymous Coward]

Original press release by PSU

One of the researchers, Professor Mohsen Kavehrad, has also worked on 100Gbps transmissions over 100m long Cat7, for example, so these people are not noobs playing with laser diodes from DVD-drives. The article mentions that "the researchers chose to take a different approach using multi-element transmitters and multi-branch optical receivers in a quasi-diffuse configuration." This article gives slightly more details: "The challenges regarding attenuation and multipath distortion can be overcome by using multi-spot diffuse configuration and fly-eye reception ( Kavehrad & Yun, 1992 ). In this configuration, the transmitted beam is split in a control manner into several narrower beams by means of holographic beam-splitters. The narrower beams illuminate selected spots on a reflecting surface. Thus, path loss due to diffusion is reduced, and fly-eye receivers can use diversity combining techniques to increase signal-to-noise ratio."

What this means is that each receiver only works with one narrow beam which is unlikely to be affected by different path lengths in the same signal and the signal from multiple receiver pairs is aligned and combined to increase the signal to noise ratio.

To the guy who can't help but laugh at the notion of pulsing a little light on and off at 1GHz: That's exactly what they're doing. The magic is in the receiver.

Re:Self interference

[Vellmont]

I don't see how this can work at the speed they're claiming. 1+ Gbps means they're pulsing that light at sub-nanosecond intervals

What makes you think that? 1+ Gb/sec doesn't mean modulating at 1 billion times/second, it's a raw bit rate. Why couldn't they be using some encoding scheme that gets multiple bits/pulse?

Re:Self interference

[AJWM]

Hmm... you don't see how it can work, so it must not work.

Well, thank you for the implied compliment to my omniscience. Or perhaps that was just a massive fail of your reading comprehension ability. I never said that it didn't work.

Perhaps they simply know more than you do.

Gee, you think? If they actually got it to work, then in this one small area I'm sure that they do. Lots of people know more about certain specialized fields than I do -- your earlier comment above notwithstanding.

they are doing something relatively new, or the technology would have existed already

Ever meet a tautology you didn't like?

I'd thank you for your insightful contribution to the discussion, but I can't find one in your post.

Re:Self interference

[AJWM]

Why couldn't they be using some encoding scheme that gets multiple bits/pulse?

Amplitude modulation isn't going to work well in the described environment, and frequency-modulating a (single) laser diode is a good trick. It's an even better trick to FM demodulate that with a photodiode. Which leaves various pulse modulating techniques.

There are a lot of things you can do with a radio signal that are a lot tougher to do with light.

Re:Self interference

[tomhudson]

Light is a bit harder to modulate than radio frequency, but it's still just a wave,

No, it's not a wave. There's this thing called a photon ... you might have heard of it.

Just because light sometimes seems to act like a wave doesn't mean it is, any more than you liking to lick your nuts means you're a dog.

Re:Self interference

[Vellmont]

There are a lot of things you can do with a radio signal that are a lot tougher to do with light.

And there's a lot of things you can do in an unregulated spectrum that you can't do in a regulated one. One is simply the transmission power. I don't see why you can't do amplitude modulation with such a wide transmission range.

and frequency-modulating a (single) laser diode is a good trick.

So use multiple diodes at multiple frequencies.

Re:Self interference

[pclminion]

The universe doesn't give too much of a shit whether you think light is a photon or not. In some contexts it acts like a particle, in others like a wave. Feynman was pretty sure that light is a particle, whose behavior can be predicted by equations which are based on waves. Whether that means light is particle, wave, both, or neither, doesn't interest me as far as knowing how to modulate it. The fact is, treating light of sufficient intensity as a wave works just fine. Take your pedantry somewhere it could do some good.

Re:Self interference

[tomhudson]

You could make the same argument about cars in a traffic jam - it doesn't change the reality of the situation - that light is NOT a wave, that that is just entrenched wrongful thinking dating back centuries.

unlikely to get anywhere

[v1]

users won't tolerate very intermittent connections, and won't tolerate having to aim their system at all. I remember using irda brirefly, and it was very touchy.

Wifi is generally omnidirectional. light doesn't work that way - you can get a very strong signal 20 feet from it, or a nonexistent signal six inches away, if you're in a bad spot. And this effect occurs in both directions, and has different deadzones. So not only are you having a problem receiving, you're also having a differnt problem sending, requiring a great deal more adjustment to get communications going. Having to solve two positional problems simultaneously effectively quadruples the difficulty of the task.

It's also going to be a great deal more environmentally sensitive. You can drop a bar or two if someone sets their laptop bag down beside your laptop and clouds direct line between you and the access point. Imagine how much worse that can get with light, and at a greater distance - you won't just lose a bar or two, you're almost certain to get completely disconnected. A couple chatting as they walk down the hall ten feet from you could ground you for several seconds, giving you absolutely no hint of what caused it.

No, this technology's not going anywhere. Sure it works, but it's nowhere near as reliable as the public will demand. Look how badly people flip out now over an occasional dropped call.

Re:unlikely to get anywhere

[TheRaven64]

I can see one use for it: ad-hoc networks. You wouldn't use it for a home network, but it would be nice for networking a few laptops together with no infrastructure, so people having a meeting can be on a network and exchange files easily.

Re:unlikely to get anywhere

[v1]

I can see one use for it: ad-hoc networks.

I would agree with that. If I wanted to send something largeish to someone else where I was it would be useful to set our laptops back to back for example and basically irda a file over. Sort of like a fast bluetooth ad-hoc. In that scenario, physical arrangement etc is already expected to be optimized.

I remember printing to an irda printer a long long time ago. (1999-2000 or so?) That was before 802.11 was around, and people were trying to figure out how I was printing leaning back in my chair with the laptop, no cables attached. And we got to see a little bright green light shining from behind the strange black patch on the front of the printer for the first time. (the irda window, the light came on when irda was in use) But it was slow and unreliable, and irda had two competing standards, it was only by chance that the printer and my laptop supported the same standard. In that instance the printer needed to be within about 30 degrees of facing me, and the same with my laptop's back side to it, and range was only about 3 feet max. The farther you separated, the harder the aim was, and it was largely a trial and error because there was no way to determine signal strength, so it may have had better range if the aim had been closer to ideal. From what I've read here, they're trying to eliminate the aim issue. In reality, the only way to get it to work reliably and consistently was to set the laptop down right in front of the printer, about 5" apart.

The idea of "security" here is almost irrelevant. It's like being concerned about privacy when you're using two tin cans and a string - privacy is the least of your problems.

Re:unlikely to get anywhere

[tomhudson]

I can see one use for it: ad-hoc networks. You wouldn't use it for a home network, but it would be nice for networking a few laptops together with no infrastructure, so people having a meeting can be on a network and exchange files easily.

Or they can use a $5 cable for transfers between two machines.

Or they can just use a sub-$50 wireless router - the router doesn't have to be connected to any particular network to allow file transfers between participating computers.

Re:unlikely to get anywhere

[sillybilly]

Every room using IRDA or light networks should have a no smoking sign. Bandwidth is important, and will be the driver for this technology. Sure, people like signals that penetrate walls and obstacles, but those waves have limited frequency, and eventually you have to go to directional/line-of-sight high frequency signals. Kind of like satellite vs. VHF. VHF goes through everything almost, but has only 13 conventional 100 MHz TV channels. UHF can carry more channels, but it's less penetrating. And satellite signals can carry thousands of channels, but require line of sight. People don't bother with satellite signals? Sure they do. Eventually. Not in 1956, but yes in 2000. IRDA and light is not for 2010, or even 1991, but yes for 2020.

What happens if...

[magsol]

...a friend of mine runs into the room in the middle of a download and starts playing with a flashlight?

Re:What happens if...

[godrik]

he will receive a shoe in the head

Re:What happens if...

[MartinSchou]

Here's what happens when you read stuff and you're a bit drunk:

What happens if... a friend of mine runs into the room in the middle of a download and starts playing with a fleshlight?

Re:What happens if...

[Anonymous Coward]

It means it's time to upgrade your friends to the kind that don't role play being Jedi Knights

Re:What happens if...

[Hurricane78]

Just like with a remote control, or with the radio, the receiver always has a frequency filter, and then demodulates it. (Because it’s likely to be FM or AM or something.)

Re:What happens if...

[Anonymous Coward]

i accidentally your whole download

1gbps is extremely useful

[Sycraft-fu]

If you have more than one computer, and that would be the sort of situation that this is targeted at (if you have only one you probalby have your cable modem plugged right in to it) 1gbps lets you transfer quickly between them. With 100mbps or lower, your limit is the network. Anything over the network is noticeably slower than something on your computer. Things can take a long time to transfer. However with 1gbps, the limitation is often as not something in your computer like the harddrive. Speeds over the network are near enough to local speeds you don't notice the difference. Copying something to a remote computer is as fast as copying it locally. It's very nice.

So sure, I have only 15mbps to the Internet. You could say for net access 100mbps is more than enough and be right. However I have a 1gbps wired network. That way my local systems can communicate extremely quickly.

Re:1gbps is extremely useful

[Anonymous Coward]

"However with 1gbps, the limitation is often as not something in your computer like the harddrive."

New hard disks can transfer way past 1 Gbit/s, like Samsung F3 (measured some 160MB/s). For laptops, it's true for now - if they don't contain a SSD.

Re:1gbps is extremely useful

[tomhudson]

With 100mbps or lower, your limit is the network

No it's not. Use a switch, not a dumb router. A switch will recognize the source and destination address, so it's 100 mbps between any two ports. Even el-cheapo switches have a 4k-entry lookup table nowadays.

Now it's true that wireless n, you're limited to 100mbps per channel (and you can actually achieve this). There's nothing to stop you from running 3 or 4 wireless routers on different channels in the same area, each connected directly to a different nic on the server. Locate each wireless in a different area of the room, (or centrally, with panels of aluminium foil to ensure that each one only "sees" a 90-degree area), with each one also jacked into the others in a star topology, and you've got your own wifi "cell" setup with 400mbps throughput. Total cost - under $300.00.

Can anyone set this up on thair roof at home and report on how they've created a public wifi with decent range? I'd want to see a mesh network of these ...

Re:1gbps is extremely useful

[Sycraft-fu]

I do use a switch. However my harddrives are still capable of transfers well in excess of 12MB/sec which is all you'll get on 100mbit networks. As such with computer to computer traffic, a 100mbit network would be the limitation. At a gig, not the case any longer. In theory maybe I could saturate it, bit in reality things are just as fast over the network as locally.

windowless rooms

[johnrpenner]

great - so now millions of drones will have to sit in windowless rooms so the network wont leak out... and the air and the trees and the birds cant leak in... dismal existence... borg colony bleah! :-P

I'm curious of the on affect people with seizures

[Brigadier]

I'm wondering what frequency this will oscillate at and if this will potentially effect people proned to seizures ?

However, if it's laser based...

[Colin Smith]

You have may be able to modify it for cheap gigabit line of sight. Which isn't an obsolete technology.

 

Re:I'm curious of the on affect people with seizur

[phil reed]

To get up to a gigabit data rate, the pulses will be so fast you'd never see them. Even if it's multiplexed across many "frequencies" (colors), the pulsing will still be far faster than any eye could detect.

Plus, you're assuming it would be visible. Infrared would be somewhat easier and cheaper to generate.

gonna let you in on something

[Eil]

I know this is like super-secret insider knowledge in the IT consulting circles, but it's something that I just have to make public no matter what the consequences are.

If you have computers in the same room that need to talk to each other, there's actually a really easy solution that is almost 100% reliable, doesn't require fiddling around with transmitters and sensors, and best of all only costs a cool $2 for the whole solution.

Just remember, you didn't hear this from me.

Re:gonna let you in on something

[cenc]

I was going to post a portable hard drive, but hey if people want to do it the hard way.

Re:I'm curious of the on affect people with seizur

[Dunbal]

I'm wondering what frequency this will oscillate at and if this will potentially effect people proned to seizures ?

      I don't think they would be so silly as to use a visible part of the spectrum. Rather I expect them to use the same frequencies used by say the remote control for your television. If it's invisible, it won't cause seizures because, well, it's invisible - the brain will not detect it. I have yet to read about television remote control induced seizures. Also if you're transmitting data, the "pulses" will be far too fast for you to notice even if it WAS visible light. Heck you can't even see your regular incandescent bulb turning on and off at 50/60Hz (depending which continent you live on). Now imagine the gigahertz range...

Of course if there are people willing to claim that radio wi-fi causes all sorts of "allergies", I'm sure there will be even more crackpots faking seizures (but somehow never wetting themselves) to prove how terrible THIS technology is. Luddites are everywhere...

Security via opacity?

[VortexCortex]

Traditional radio frequency systems (Wi-Fi , WiMAX etc.) do not require line of sight transmission, but can pass through some substances and so present a security problem. Light, in a room without windows, will not escape the room, improving security."

As if security through obscurity weren't bad enough, now we'll have security via opacity... which can easily be defeated by slipping a fiber optic cable under the door, or through a small hole in the wall.

Bottom line: You'll still need to encrypt your data and it won't be any more secure than Wi-Fi. Both Wi-Fi and Optical signals will only be as secure as the encryption system they use.

So, Optical transmission IS NOT more secure than Wi-Fi, and it sucks at traveling through walls (unlike Wi-Fi)... Wired 1Gps networks don't "leak" from the room with the door and windows open either... ( why we should care about this? )

Has anyone thought about upoads?

[SwimmerBoy]

What if I want to upload a file, or even just send the small amount of data to request a download? Will my laptop suddenly turn into something resembling a 90's rave?

I always knew one day I would find a scientific

[hellop2]

reason for living in my mom's basement.

Mirrors.

[Toze]

Funny thing about light. You can reflect it, direct it, quick rewrite it- er, anyway. It'll be like that scene in the Mummy sequel, only instead of mirrors, gold, and flesh-eating scarabs, it'll be mirrors, internet, and botnets. :D

Disco ball of internet! Woo!

Re:Mirrors.

[tomhudson]

Mummy sequel

that's MummySQL, you insensitive clod!

> mummysql
> Welcome to the MummySQL monitor program version 1523 B.C ("CurseOfTheRevengeOfTheMummy")
> USE bad_movies_database_for_100_alex;
> database changed
> SELECT "mirrors" FROM "internet" WHERE "botnet" == 1 LIMIT 666;
>YOU BE P0WNED! Bwahahahahaha!

a room without Windows

[frovingslosh]

Light, in a room without windows, will not escape the room, improving security.

That would be great, if that was what wifi was used for. But it is not. If the connection was limited to a single room, ethernet cables could be used, which would give even better security. Far more wifi systems are set up to get the network connection between rooms, even between floors of a house, than for networks in windowless rooms.

Besides, everyone already knows that a computer room without Windows is more secure than one with Windows.

Give thanks to the CSIRO

[Anonymous Coward]

Ever wondered what the wifi patent suit by the Australian CSIRO against a bunch of American megacorps covered? It was the algorithms and technology to solve just the problem you've just mentioned (in the RF band). The engineers were Radio Telescope scientists, see the story and transcript at http://www.abc.net.au/catalyst/stories/2708730.htm

Replace WiFi

[owlstead]

Another flashy headline. Who the fuck do they think they are, the sun?

Color me skeptical

[Peter Simpson]

At a former job, I worked with a bunch of guys who had tried to develop a free-space optical Token Ring network. Aside from the inadvisability of basin it on the Devil's own networking protocol, their biggest problems were multipath and low receiver signal level.

They never got it truly working. I suspect these guys won't either. Signals bouncing off walls attenuate pretty quickly with each bounce and you end up needing a fairly large surface area detector.

Re:I'm curious of the on affect people with seizur

[Anonymous Coward]

Heck you can't even see your regular incandescent bulb turning on and off at 50/60Hz (depending which continent you live on).

I think either you mean flourescent, or I wasn't paying attention in grade school.

Re:I'm curious of the on affect people with seizur

[Dunbal]

I think either you mean flourescent, or I wasn't paying attention in grade school.

Alternating current? The current flows one way in the wire, then the other way. At some point the flow has to be zero to get from one direction to another. When there's no current, your light bulb is technically "off" (not really because the filament is still hot and glowing). The FREQUENCY of the alternating current is 60 Hertz in North America. That means that your lightbulb is switching on and off 60 times per second. Of course due to the residual heat in the filament, it would be more fair to say that the incandescent light bulb is "pulsating" at 60Hz between a maximum and minimum brightness. The nature of fluorescent lights makes this "flicker" even more noticeable, since it's not a bit of hot wire providing light but the actual current moving through a gas.

You must now exchange your nerd card for this pink "probationary nerd" card.

I'm surprised

[elsJake]

Nobody knows of Ronja. It's been around since forever.
Visible laser based point-to-point networking good for 1.4km@10Mbps. I think they were working on a 100Mbps version as well but i haven't seen much progress in that direction.
Sure it's not 1Gbps and it doesn't serve the exact same market segment but the technology is already here , it's cheap to build and the designs are free so i thought some of you might get some use out of it.

Sounds like a great idea...

[Anonymous Coward]

...for Raves or Dance parties, but less so for those with epilepsy.

This could put a crimp in war-driving

[Pictish Prince]

That being said, there are a hell of a lot more uses for a LAN than internet access. Can you imagine a LAN party at 1Gbps?

Somebody has to say it...

[Angst Badger]

Do not check network signal with remaining eye.

Replace Bluetooth?

[amchugh]

This seems like a good solution for replacing bluetooth, or bridging a room full of machines to one ethernet drop for a low cost office network solution.

Have you ever heard of optical filters?

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you ever heard of optical filters? You can have windows with optical filter eliminating the wavelength of transmission. Since it is in infrared, your windows probably block it already, if you have good windows. Good window glass is coated with thin metallic layer to block infrared from going out of your hose (reduces heat loss) and going in (reduces expenses on air conditioning in summer). That is in Europe however, I do not know how about your windows in US.

what about the return data?

[CFD339]

      If I ignore the encoding issues and assume some mix of frequency and amplitude shifts or whatever to get that kind of bandwidth, I can go along with the idea that a well placed optical transmitter could bounce light around the room enough to do this -- but what about the return signal from the workstation or device? That would hardly be placed in an optimal location.

      Further, consider that wireless is most useful for mobile and transient devices -- laptops, sure; but what about cell phones, pda's, sensors, and all manner of other wireless things. These are frequently -- even usually -- not placed in direct visual sight.

      Frankly, I see this technology as potentially useful in long distance settings between stationary platforms (particularly in space) but not so much for day to day campus or home-office use.

Re:Replace Bluetooth? - keep RF out of my head

[ChapterS]

Give the potential risk of RF transmitters in contact with your noggin, and where bluetooth might help, but is really more of the same, could I please have a headset that talks to my phone via wireless optical? Please? ........

Cellphones and Brain Tumors 15 Reasons for Concern
www.radiationresearch.org/pdfs/reasons_us.pdf

TOC
15 Reasons for Concern

Concern 1
Industry’s own research showed cellphones caused brain tumors
Concern 2
Subsequent industry-funded research also showed that using a cellphone elevated the risk of brain tumors (2000-2002)
Concern 3
Interphone studies, published to date, consistently show use of a cellphone for less than 10 years protects the user from a brain tumor
Concern 4
Independent research shows there is risk of brain tumors from cellphone use
Concern 5
Despite the systemic-protective-skewing of all results in the Interphone studies, significant risk for brain tumors from cellphone use was still found
Concern 6
Studies independent of industry funding show what would be expected if wireless phones cause brain tumors
Concern 7
The danger of brain tumors from cellphone use is highest in children, and the younger a child is when he/she starts using a cellphone, the higher the risk
Concern 8
There have been numerous governmental warnings about children’s use of cellphones
Concern 9
Exposure limits for cellphones are based only on the danger from heating
Concern 10
An overwhelming majority of the European Parliament has voted for a set of changes based on “health concerns associated with electromagnetic fields
Concern 11
Cellphone radiation damages DNA, an undisputed cause of cancer
Concern 12
Cellphone radiation has been shown to cause the blood-brain barrier to leak
Concern 13
Cellphone user manuals warn customers to keep the cellphone away from the body even when the cellphone is not in use
Concern 14
Federal Communications Commission (FCC) warning for cordless phones
Concern 15
Male fertility is damaged by cellphone radiation

Re:I'm curious of the on affect people with seizur

[SScorpio]

They can't really use the IR frequencies that remotes use though, otherwise all of your A/V equipment will go nuts.

Life Without Walls

[epp_b]

Guess it won't work with Windows ;)

Point to point

[symbolset]

It's a laser so the beam can be tight. That lends itself to geeking it to reflective targets mutually visible in outdoor applications. If people can get wifi at 237 miles, this tech may be capable of extending both the range and bandwidth of point to point communications. That would extend the reach of the Internet to a lot of people isolated by distance and infrastructure. That would be cool.

And then there's the neighborhood network thing. I can gather maybe 250 single family homes into a network with a fenceline network without crossing a right-of-way with a cable. Leveraging this tech I could probably extend that reach to 30,000 families. If you can build a 1 Gbps network that large in the US, the Internet will beat a path to you because you've got something they want: earners with eyeballs. Real bandwidth becomes free, which changes a whole bunch of things in a totally positive way

Re:Point to point

[ClosedSource]

There are already FSO (Free Space Optics) approaches for outdoor use that are superior to this new approach (see http://www.lightpointe.com/ for example).

Re:Point to point

[symbolset]

We use these at work and they're great! I was looking for something more consumer grade and cost.

Thanks though.

Re:Point to point

[TheLink]

If they geek it too much someone might go blind... Seriously.

The design might be safe since they'd be spreading out the laser, but it could become unsafe if someone starts collimating the light (or removing the "decollimator"). Especially since the "laser" in such devices is likely to be invisible to the eye (but still able to damage retinas).

The risk of someone making the "wifi" replacement into something dangerous is low, but too many people don't realize the dangers of lasers, so it might not be low enough.

Just recently there was someone who was messing about with a "made in china" class 3B laser device that draws animated and decorative patterns, the idiot was pointing it at everyone in the room I was in. I told him to stop but he kept playing with it. Sure a class 3B does not automatically make you blind, but you don't go positioning it where it can hit people in the eye directly. And you should stop doing that when people tell you to stop.

It's not the same as pointing a bright spotlight at someone. Evidence that it is much riskier is shown by articles like: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audience_scanning
http://www.laserist.org/2008-07_Russian-incident.htm

The amount of precautions you have to take to make it safe show that it's not like some normal bright light (more like light from an arc-welder - or even brighter).

So it's closer to pointing a loaded gun at someone, nobody gets hurt if there are no screw ups, but you've just made things a lot more dangerous.

Re:Point to point

[TheLink]

FWIW, I'd rather get shot than go blind (if I get shot in my eye I'd most likely die, which sucks but at least it's quick).

Re:Point to point

[zill]

Just recently there was someone who was messing about with a "made in china" class 3B laser device that draws animated and decorative patterns, the idiot was pointing it at everyone in the room I was in. I told him to stop but he kept playing with it. Sure a class 3B does not automatically make you blind, but you don't go positioning it where it can hit people in the eye directly. And you should stop doing that when people tell you to stop.

Actually class 3B lasers causes immediate and permanent damage to eyes.

Re:I'm curious of the on affect people with seizur

[Anonymous Coward]

If you wanted to screw with people by sending, for example, a packet with a 1500-byte payload of 0x00 alternating with a 1500-byte payload of 0xff, the frquency issue could be overcome - just use as many packets in the sequence as required to achieve the optimal frequency. But yes, there is still the infrared issue, and this light wouldn't be very intense in any case.

Laser ray that shoots thru walls

[Anonymous Coward]

Man it must be hell of a job trying to get CE (nee) safety clearance for this in Europe :)

Tower to tower

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok so I'm not seeing this mentioned anywhere...

Suppose you stick this tech on a nice tall cell tower, and beam it (not to users) to another cell tower. You've just created a gigabit network between your towers with absolute minimal infrastructure. This would make a great com backbone, wouldn't it?

Re:Tower to tower

[Anonymous Coward]

Reiterate what I said. This makes no sense as broadcast technology. This is PERFECT for point-to-point communication such as towers.

Not line of sight, but still need same room

[physburn]

Can't see this being any use for replacing WI-FI in a room, it might just bounce into the hallwall, but its not going though closed doors. Radio WI-FI happily connects the whole house, plus the garden. The optical network would connect one room, and if you lucky an nearby room though open doors. I could imagine the optical wireless to an alternative for a large open plan office, especially if each office area was on a different network, other than that radio waves and wires will continue to rule.

---

Network Feed @ Feed Distiller

Not the same...

[jjoelc]

but here in Las Vegas we have gigabit wireless available at the corporate level at least.

As for the article (...ummm, I mean summary, this is /. where I know better than to RTFA...) I can see some niche uses for this, but not anything that points to "replace Wi-fi" potential... Cubical farms, or any other location where you need to share info with a group of people, but don't want anyone not allowed physical access to the location to have a chance to start poking around.

If you are that serious about security, use wires... with lots of shielding. Properly grounded... with a faraday cage built into the walls... walls which have been acoustically isolated from the outside walls of the building... and... and...

Will not pickup another hymn

[Anonymous Coward]

Write something useful

Mod parent insightful

[TheVelvetFlamebait]

This also tends to happen with my WiFi solution as well.

my bionic eye 0wns

[almondo]

Yeah, but my bionic eye (I bought it on the down low from Steve Austin a while back after his show was cancelled) will be able to glaze over and jack all the data from a mile away if they have a window.

sounds good

[Anonymous Coward]

but it depends what's worse for your health, being zapped with wi-fi microwaves, or light beams. Also, why can't u use it outside? There's light interference whether inside or outside.

Feature

[Anonymous Coward]

It's great how the summary turns "not being able to stream across a room" into a feature, and not a disadvantage. If it's in the same room, I can probably cable it just fine.

Public demo of BabelCrypt® a success!!!

[rts008]

Also conferences with a could hundred livebloggers in an auditorium.

Now you too can encrypt your comments so securely that even your intended audience cannot decipher them! As an added bonus, order now and get the Klingon Obfuscating Module® absolutely FREE!!!! (see example above)

Oh, I think you accidentally your comment...

Anonymous Coward

[Anonymous Coward]

What about epileptics ? I mean having something flashing that fast can cause serious problems on some people...

why close the door?

[KingSatan]

i think this is a good initial idea... something that the tech community can build off of... i dont see the problem is the light is at a certain spectrum you dont need the windows closed unless you dont want people leeching youre high speed wireless connection... and they wouldnt be able to unless its in the path of the ray anyway. i could see this at lan parties over wifi. just wait till the health freaks start buggin out over the radiation it emits.... :facepalm: