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Historic IEEE 802 Group Looks Back and Forward
An anonymous reader writes "The IEEE MAN/LAN Standards Committee — better known as the people who brought us Ethernet, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth — is celebrating its 30th anniversary next week. This article has interviews with the original committee chairman and other veteran members, and reveals some of the inside situation. It also looks at some of the upcoming 802.x standards including one that sends data by modulating visible light."
IEEE did not develop the Bluetooth standard
Don't we use visible light in optic fibre for some time now? ;-)
Now, mod me down freely. My karma can't get any worse...
This is really nostalgic I almost forgot what MAN meant!
In case people don't get it, with the current WiFi standards you cannot have an easy way for a Cafe/Hotel/Conference to provide encrypted wireless connections to guests in a way where they cannot snoop on each other's connections. if you use preshared key users can decrypt each other's traffic. If you use username and password, it's far more inconvenient for the user and the service provider.
Agree. Wireless security was really broken from the start, and has got only slightly better, slowly...
Interoperability between devices from different vendors is not so bad now.
On the other hand, if you travel around the world you can actually enjoy the convenience of wirelessly connecting to the internet almost anywhere.
(The other day I did a free conf call, via Wifi in some airport terminal, with three people in three different continents, using my bluetooth headset on a cheap laptop...could you imagine that 20 years ago?)
So, better an imperfect solution that works, than no solution. Well done IEEE!
... is the 20th Anniversary of the 802.11 Working Group itself. The Working Group held its first meeting September 10-14, 1990, in Oshawa, Ontario, Canada.
In the Bilski case, IEEE filed a brief pushing *for* software patents. Maybe specific groups in IEEE, like the 802 group, should push for a change in this position. Having the whole wifi industry paying a tax to CSIRO for a wifi patent must make this group a little more clued in about the harm caused.
Please help publicise swpat.org - the software patents wiki
I am staggered how complicated it is to setup WiFi a lay-person. Far too much jargon (SSID, WPA, WPA2, WEP, TKIP, AES+TKIP, channels ...), and stupid ideas like multiple WEP keys. Let alone connecting via ethernet, change the subnet, browse to an IP address, etc etc etc just to get it going. What an awful decade of design.
Look ... from day 1 we just wanted a secret password.
Public networks are different and need to be publicly identified - don't shoe-horn it into the same user interface.
Start thinking like a user and stop this engineers crap.
In case people don't get it, with the current wired Ethernet standards, you cannot have an easy way for a Cafe/Hotel/Conference to provide encrypted wired connections to guests in a way where they cannot snoop on each other's connections either. If you want security, you should be using end-to-end encryption.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Man, how ungratefull can you get. Why dont you go out and develop you own "standard" wireless protocol and see how long it takes you!
Err...no, that's what they were supposed to be doing. Or do you think an eight-year lead time is acceptable? And your answer is stupid anyway - you don't say 'well write your own OS' when someone complains about Windows.
The only hardware I've ever had an auto-negotiate issue with is Cisco switches, on many occasions with completely different clients over many years. Everyone else seems to play nice, but Cisco was well known for implementing their own "standard" early.
Which tells me exactly how much networking hardware you've actually worked with, so let me fill you in - ISCSI not working? Set all adaptors to 1000/Full. Backup Exec not working? Set all adaptors to 1000/Full. Network generally slow? Set all adaptors to 1000/Full. I could list around 20 more off the top of my head...and then there's stuff such as - Vista network auto-tuning buggering up your system? That's because there's *no standard*.
So yes, after wasting my time for *years* with non-compatible Wireless, Bluetooth and Ethernet 'standards', I think I've earnt the right to be ungrateful, thank you very much :-)
...prehaps they could get around to increasing MTU from 1500.
Cool. I've worked with Paul Nikolich (when ADC broadband bought bought the CMTS company he was at), and have run into some of this cast of characters during the 802.3ah Ethernet in the First Mile meetings. Interesting folks.
I think it was Geoff (I could be wrong, this was a while ago) that said we would not need high-speed uplink from the home because 'there just isn't that much relevant content out there'. That was a pretty good chuckler.
I'm sure Michael Coden of Codenoll feels snubbed, he always claimed to me he was the co-inventor of ethernet.Never believed him.
He did pioneer one interesting product- a distributed ethernet switch that would operate over a unidirectional fiber ring- worked pretty well after I fixed the gaping hole in his protocol.
Dave
The official name of 802 is the IEEE 802 "LAN/MAN Standards Committee," not the other way around.