7Gbps Wi-Fi Networking Kit Could Launch In 2010

Mark.JUK writes "Wireless Local Area Networking (WLAN 802.11) adapters capable of speeds 'up to' 7Gigabits per second could be in stores by the end of this year. The Wireless Gigabit Alliance (WiGig), which seeks to advance the worldwide adoption and use of 60GHz wireless networking technology, has published a unified specification for its approach and opened an Adopter Program. The move means that WiGig members can now begin developing a Wi-Fi kit that uses the unlicensed 60GHz spectrum."

Comments

The keyword:

[Anonymous Coward]

"Could".

Re:The keyword:

[ls671]

Yep, industries always slows down implementation of new technologies in order to keep sort of a backlog in the pipeline of new technologies available for marketing purposes. By slowing down the pace, they also save in R&D because they make their investment in a given technology more profitable by extending the lifetime of the said technology.

I know some will say that this is contrary to free market rules, the company owning a new technology should rush it out the doors. But the big players might often be involved in some kind of collusion not always known to the general public. Really breakthrough technologies are often bought by the biggest players and put on a shelf.

This is true in all kind of fields. The important thing is to keep the appearance of a free market so consumers are happy ;-)

After all, corporations are there to make to most money possible, not to make the technological world move faster at their own expense.

Re:The keyword:

[somersault]

I know some will say that this is contrary to free market rules, the company owning a new technology should rush it out the doors. But the big players might often be involved in some kind of collusion not always known to the general public.

OH! I know this one! It's that most insidious of taboos, a practice only endorsed by the greediest and biggest fish in the pond. I think it's called "testing" or "improving reliability" or something.

Re:The keyword:

[cgenman]

Is this the industry that launched 802.11N before the draft specification had even hit 2.0, and 6 years before the spec was finished? That were selling computers "With Vista" (upgrade coupons) almost two years before vista launched? That

I don't disagree that many industries milk adequate-but-not-best technologies because they're more profitable at the moment. But the consumer tech industry has a tendency to push things out the door before they're done.

Re:The keyword:

[ls671]

> But the consumer tech industry has a tendency to
> push things out the door before they're done.

Collusion talks don't always end up with agreements. There are some wars going on. In some cases although, when an important monetary impact is unavoidable for all of them, the most important players might come to an agreement. In other cases, you end up with a split decision, where there is more than one side. A group of players on one side and another group of players on another side.

It is still a free market to some level. Only, it is affected by what I explained in my post in such a way that implementation of new technologies is slowed down globally. Avoiding this trivial conclusion would require me to put on pink colored glasses ;-))

Speed=Good, but How About Distance?

[WrongSizeGlass]

Will this "new, magical and unicorn-like" WiFi travel further? Far enough for municipal WiFi to effectively cover its citizens? If so then the increased coverage is more important than the speed improvement (even though the speed bump is might impressive).

Re:Speed=Good, but How About Distance?

[Goaway]

At 60 GHz? No. It's hard enough getting that to propagate through air, let alone walls. This is for short-range communication exclusively.

"Municipal WiFi" will never happen on a large scale and in the long run, for this reason: If you want signals to propagate, you need to stick to low enough frequencies, and that means there just isn't enough bandwidth to cover a large number of people at the same time. It just barely works now, and bandwidth demand will only grow. Wires are here to stay: You'll still need to wire every house, every apartment, and have local transceivers if you want a wireless connection. There just isn't enough bandwidth in the open air.

Re:Speed=Good, but How About Distance?

[bcomisky]

Will this "new, magical and unicorn-like" WiFi travel further? Far enough for municipal WiFi to effectively cover its citizens? If so then the increased coverage is more important than the speed improvement (even though the speed bump is might impressive).

At 60GHz you need line-of-sight to make a connection.. walls, buildings, trees, are all a signal killer; much more so than at 2.5/5 GHz. In general in a cluttered environment, your signal will propagate further with a longer wavelength (lower frequency, think AM/FM radio). So in short, no. It will not travel as far.

For line of sight point-to-point applications you can get very high gain from a 60GHz dish (same size dish as 2.5GHz is electrically much larger in wavelengths), though they will probably be more expensive with the tighter manufacturing tolerances required for the smaller feed parts.

Re:Speed=Good, but How About Distance?

[poetmatt]

Well, you are correct that 60 Ghz will be horrible for distance. However, the wiring just has to be smart. There is gigabit powerline ethernet, which requires no additional wiring. So you could have that, and then a wireless AP (7Gbps) in the room if you really want the wireless/ Meanwhile, you may as well just have a regular ethernet line from that powerline ethernet adapter. Really, that thing is pretty portable on it's own and makes me question why people even want wifi in some instances. The portability of these devices is merely limited to an outlet in a house, which is about the same concept of an AP (which has to be plugged in), except that it doesn't get interference from surrounding wifi channels.

real bandwidth

[ZyBex]

What's the real bw available? 2 Gbps?
With 802.11n we get max 90Mbps from the carrier's 300; that's only 30% eficiency. I hope it's better this time.

Re:Doesn't Matter if Throttled

[FauxPasIII]

> It doesn't matter if you're throttled. I barely use bandwidth, and I'm still throttled all to hell.

That's only true if your only IP traffic is via your throttled connection to the Internet. Who doesn't have a big media file server somewhere on their LAN these days?

Oh crap!

[Dishwasha]

I'd better prepare the tin foil to head off my 60Ghz allergy.

No

[Sycraft-fu]

Because wired has less problems. Wireless is nice in that, well, it doesn't require wires. So no cables to run. Less hassle in terms of physical effort, and you can move around while using it but that's where the advantages end. Wired has some big advantages:

1) Security. With wireless, there is always the issue of other people listening to your signal. Unless you live in a farady cage, you can't control where that signal goes. That means you have to deal with shit like encrypting the entire signal. That takes additional configuration to make work, and additional hardware to accomplish at high speeds. While AES isn't particularly intensive, try doing it at a gigabit. It'll hit a modern CPU hard and no way some cheap embedded device pulls it off without ASICs to help.

2) Contention. With a wireless system, you are all using the same bandwidth. This means it doesn't scale well with more connections. The more computers you have on it, the lower your total throughput. Not a problem with wired connections, each computer gets dedicated bandwidth to the switch. So I can transfer to you at full bandwidth while two other people also transfer at full bandwidth and there's no contention.

3) Range. Even under pretty good conditions, wireless doesn't match up to the distance you can get from a normal Cat-6 run (100 meters). Of course you also have wired technology for longer runs (like fiber), or you can simply have a switch repeat the signal.

4) Simplicity. While it is more work to lay the wires, once done you have less effort. A system just plugs in and all necessary information can be provided to it, no config necessary. With wireless, configuration must be done on the client machine, at least if any encryption is to be involved.

5) Reliability. Wireless just has problems. Be it interference from other devices on the same band, dead zones, weather, whatever, you can lose wireless signal because of too low a SNR. Not the case with a wired connection. They tend to always work, unless the cable breaks and that is quite rare.

6) Speed. Whatever you can do with wireless, you can probalby do better with wired. Just tends to be the case. This is particularly true if you include fiber in the wired category, but even if not. Right now N is as good as it gets wireless which gets maybe 100mbps of throughput max in terms of actual data (300mbps data rate, but there's tons of overhead). 1gpbs wired is common, 10gbps is available over regular twisted pair. Faster is being developed for normal twisted pair, and faster is already available for fiber or something like CX4.

Nothing wrong with wireless, but it is an addition to wired, not a replacement. I have a WAP so that I can use my laptop everywhere in my house. However my desktop, my Blu-ray, etc are all hard wired. I don't see that changing.

not a "mobile" technology

[dmoen]

As I understand it, this is a replacement for running a fibre optic link between your house and your ISP. Instead, you mount an antenna on your roof, which engages in narrow beam, line of sight 60 GHz communication with your ISP. I think the benefits are that it is potentially cheaper than running a fibre optic cable to your house. The signal is attenuated by rain, and by atmospheric oxygen. I doubt the signal can travel very well through walls. And I don't think it is useful for mobile devices.

Doug Moen

This is going to suck for most uses

[Sycraft-fu]

So the higher the frequency of your signal, the more bandwidth you can get. Easy to understand why. However there is a tradeoff, and that is distance/penetration. Low frequency signals can travel extremely long distances, and penetrate through material well. The ultimate example is the sub communication systems like Seafarer. That system, operating at a 76Hz carrier, could penetrate the entire Earth and send signals to submerged subs anywhere, at a rate of about 3 characters per minute.

So as you go up, the opposite is true. Go up to the 100s of GHz and you can carry astounding amounts of data if you like, but you find that the air itself will attenuate your signal a whole lot, and forget about a wall or the like.

This is why there's competition for various ranges of the spectrum, like 700MHz. One range is not as good as any other. Were that the case, we'd have no problem as there is plenty of space up in the high GHz range. However it's not. Low frequency spectrum can be very useful for things.

At 60GHz, you are going to need line of sight pretty much. It might penetrate a bit of stuff, but you can forget about having an access point 5 rooms over that goes through a few walls.

For a point-to-point outdoor link it'd work ok, though it would be the kind of thing that would suffer from reduced data rate or a completely dropped signal in the rain and rain plays hell on signals that high frequency.

So I can see it for special cases, but the next WiFi it will not be.

Doesn't matter.

[adolf]

For most practical purposes, 60GHz signals don't penetrate anything. They just bounce around like light.

This stuff might be good for fixed point-to-point links, but that's about it.

I've worked a bit with existing 60GHz products, and while they're generally faster than greased shit, the alignment of them is typically very critical and, sometimes, even seasonal. This isn't the sort of product that would be useful for municipal wifi, except perhaps as a backhaul between 802.11 radios.

Of course, like any new product where there's money to be made, the marketers will claim that it slices, it dices, and it makes Julienne fries. Caveat emptor, etc. (But wait! There's more! If you act now, the sky will always be blue, you'll always be young, and you'll ejaculate rainbows.)

Meh.

Re:Doesn't matter.

[MachineShedFred]

"60GHz signals don't penetrate anything. They just bounce around like light"

You're not just kidding about that. Police Ka-band traffic radar operates at around 34Ghz, specifically *because* it reflects so well. It's not going to get any better at a higher frequency.

Re:Please. Someone tell me. What is the point

[QBasicer]

Perhaps sharing files between computers on a network? Backing up your hard-drive to another machine? That's lots of reasons to have a faster network, without a faster internet speed.

Re:Please. Someone tell me. What is the point

[tomhudson]

My internet connection ( DSL ) can't come anywhere near saturating my 802.11g router's 54Gbps.

You have an 802.11g router that's rated at 54 Gbps?

Unless I have a fiber optic line running to my home,

The cable company ran fibre down the next street last year. They're offering 50mpbs now (+ phone + video on demand, so there's enough headroom that they could easily offer 100mbps), and they'll keep upping it every few years, as demand (marketing) warrants.

how do I benefit from faster wireless

Most homes have more than one computer nowadays. Moving files between them, or to / from your smartphone?

Also, since you finish transmitting the data quicker, you free up the channel for other users that much quicker.

Re:Please. Someone tell me. What is the point

[eyrieowl]

Well, as others pointed out, there's other reasons for having a fast network other than internet access; and you can't expect that your broadband speed won't *eventually* go up. However, I completely agree that broadband speed is seriously lagging what it probably should be. Yes, I'm sure there's any number of posters who can say they've got some special, wonderful fibre hookup, but that isn't yet available to the majority of people. And, honestly, until it is, a faster home network just isn't tremendously exciting.

Feature inflation...

[Five Bucks!]

Consumer companies will jump on this shit like crazy just to maintain teh price point of wireless routers and APs. I always expected to get a 802.11g router for cheap once 802.11n came out. Instead, it's harder to find g routers.

To me, and most people I know, a new 802.11 standard won't mean a row of beans and yet they'll still have to shell out $50 to buy a new router when they spill their coffee on it.