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Wi-Fi Direct Gets Real With Product Certification
CWmike writes "Wi-Fi Direct officially became a concrete technology today, with several new laptop components certified by the Wi-Fi Alliance. That threshold was reached before most people even understand what Wi-Fi Direct is, reports Matt Hamblen. Wi-Fi Direct is a new technology designed to allow peer-to-peer Wi-Fi connections between devices like smartphones and cameras without a traditional Wi-Fi network or the need for Wi-Fi access points. This means that a camera with Wi-Fi Direct installed could communicate via Wi-Fi to a digital picture frame or printer, uploading picture data over the same range of existing Wi-Fi, about 200 yards at speeds of up to 250Mbit/sec, said Wi-Fi Alliance CEO Edgar Figueroa. 'Imagine if two people were on a train and wanted to play a game in real time on their separate handhelds but had no cellular or Wi-Fi hot spot. They still could play with Wi-Fi Direct,' he said."
I've been able to have two Wifi laptops communicate in an ad-hoc network forever, so how is this really different?
All of the same benefits of Bluetooth, plus the WiFi congestion and interference headaches we already enjoy just to get Internet access???
Where do I sign up???
*rant off*
this is so amazing. now i can not communicate with anybody else on a train because they would have to pay for the same game & it cant be copied from phone phone to the next, and their operating system is different, and i cant show them how to get the game because their phones GUI is different.. its like.. bluetooth!
Whats the harm in yelling 'Computer, end program!'? You could be living in Star Trek! Go on.. give it a try.
Because you didn't have to pay for the privilege of using ad-hoc
This is just a brand name for ad-hoc networking, then?
then goes on to give an example of 2 people playing a game, which has been done on the psp and the DS for getting close to a decade
its just brand naming ad-hoc and does not show or explain how it is different
Bluetooth 3.0 uses WiFi as the underlying carrier technology.
And it goes to 13 in Japan.
According to Wikipedia, Wi-Fi Direct is ad-hoc mode Wi-Fi device with a built-in Wi-Fi Protected Access setup daemon, optional access point software (e.g., routing to other networks) and an as-yet undefined service discovery mechanism (e.g., UPnP, Bonjour). Basically, they are writing a standard which ties together several existing standards and best practices. This sort of meta-standard is quite common.
One example they give is a picture frame, which offers only the required ad-hoc mode Wi-Fi and Wi-Fi Protected Access daemon, and a simple service for file upload. The user would connect to it, upload pictures, and then disconnect. Nothing else would be offered by the frame, but the user would not need to do any manual setup or buy any additional devices.
A more complicated example is a cell phone which offers tethering. In addition to the required ad-hoc mode Wi-Fi and Wi-Fi Protected Access daemon, has full blown bridging/routing and service discovery daemons built-in. The user would expect to treat this device more like an infrastructure mode network in a single package; perhaps some setup would be required on the Wi-Fi Direct device, but virtually no additional setup would be required on each connected device.
So basically they are just making a standard, the implementation of which requires doing all of the things we have done manually for our own networks. This is just one step further in simplifying network setup, but not any kind of new revolution.
The preceding comments reflect the author's personal opinion and are public domain, unless explicitly stated otherwise.
Sniffing of wireless keyboards using WiFi is gonna be even easier than before.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
bluetooth is GREAT for remote controls... first of all you don't need line of sight to the receiver, and the latency and responsiveness are at least 5 times as good as IR... i recently got the bluetooth slide remote for tivo and didn't even realize how slow my IR remote was to respond until things started working like they should with bluetooth.
Only when high speed data is needed, like for file transfers, and only for the radio layer. The protocol is still very much bluetooth.
And bluetooth 4.0 introduced a low power spec, that should allow a compatible device to function for quite some time from a coin style battery (or perhaps even smaller).
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
This is very true. I have a bluetooth mouse with the original battery that came with it inside, and it's still working after 2 years of use. Device with low bandwidth and little mobility requirements are very good with bluetooth right now.
I wonder how long it will actually take to phase out bluetooth. I mean, that tech has been around forever and never really caught on outside of phones.
Bluetooth passes the 8KHz network timing natively, by timing its frame rate to the network clock and having built-in provisions for picking a good clocking master. This is very handy for cellphone peripherals because it makes them cheap: The phone provides an accurate and (if appropriate) network-synchronized clock to the the A/D converters in microphones, which only have to synchronize to the frame rate from the phone's bluetooth signal rather than have a stratum-III or better clock built in.
With WiFI any solutions to timing-transfer issues (other than those of the link itself) are add-on kludges.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Actually, Bluetooth 3.0 uses IEEE802.11, not Wi-Fi, as the underlying carrier technology. Wi-Fi is a superset of 802.11 features. Wi-Fi brings broad interoperability, higher level functionality and mandated conformance to established standards. BT 3.0 uses 802.11 as an Alternate MAC/PHY (AMP) layer, has a fixed signaling rate of 24Mbps, and does the "networking" using the BT radio and BT protocols, not Wi-Fi. It is not necessary for a 802.11 radio that is set up to run in BT3.0 mode to be compatible with a standard Wi-Fi access point, as BT3.0 is really supposed to be used to allow higher speed data transfer (about 8x) between two BT3.0-enabled devices, like a cameraphone and a notepad. Wi-Fi Direct is direct competition to BT 3.0, but does it more simply with the one radio, technology and protocol rather than two radios and a mix of protocols that are very different and more costly.
As some of you might remember from way back in 2005, originally the high-speed AMP was going to be Ultrawide Band (UWB), but the BTSIG took a bet on the WiMedia Alliance's MB-OFDM quasi-UWB technology and lost when WiMedia folded its tent in early 2009, after probably a dozen manufacturers had failed to get MB-OFDM silicon to work as promoted.
Bluetooth is not gone, in fact BT Classic (the 2.1 stuff) is in the majority of all cellular handsets sold in the world today, and I think each week something like 20 million BT chips are shipped in product, 90++% of that in cellular handsets and headsets. However, the actual usage of BT is pretty low since most people don't really seem to take to headsets, or if they do use a headset, it's often wired since that eliminates the need to charge two batteries. Like I saw somewhere else, BT seems like the IRDA of the 21st Century, ubiquitous yet little used
That having been said, Since 2004 or so I've been using BT headsets (5-6 models now), multiple BT-enabled phones, even a BT-enabled PDA (remember the old Sony Clie), and am generally satisfied by the convenience and performance. Pairing has gotten way better with 2.1, my phone (BB) only forgets about my headset (Jabra) every second week or three, requiring a repairing effort. But I'm an engineer, and have some tolerance for touchy gadgetry... And no, I'm not a member of either the BTSIG or the Wi-Fi Alliance.