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802.11ad Will Knock Your Socks Off, Says Interop Panel
alphadogg writes "While the Wi-Fi world is rightly abuzz over the rapidly approaching large-scale deployment of the new 802.11ac standard, experts at an Interop NY panel said this week that the 802.11ad standard is likely to be even more transformative. '802.11ac is an extension for pure mainstream Wi-Fi,' said Sean Coffey, Realtek's director of standards and business development. 'It's evolutionary. ... You're not going to see dramatically new use cases." By contrast, 802.11ad adds 60GHz connectivity to the previously used 2.4GHz and 5GHz frequencies, potentially providing multi-gigabit connection speeds and dramatically broadening the number of applications for which wireless can be used."
And the signal range will be abysmal.
My socks are lined with foil, it's already a problem with microwaves..
802.11ad after 802.11ac could potentially be a sign that we will start following the alphabet for subsequent releases of 802.11 wifi standards. That on its own would be a good reason to adopt it - just to straighten out the alphabet soup that was previous wifi standards.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
So... should I keep waiting? I haven't gone up to "N" yet, even. Now we have ac coming, and ad on the board. Yeesh.
Look, the problem isn't available bandwidth, it's the fact that it's unlicensed bandwidth. Which means part 15 of the FCC rules; "device must accept any harmful interference..." Sure, right now there's only one set of devices and one standard for that frequency range, but give it time. A bug or problem will be discovered. A new protocol will need to be released. Someone will discover some new way of squeezing out just a few more drops of speed -- and it'll be incompatible. And because it's all running on the same frequency, there will be contention. Eventually, the entire situation de-evolves into the same thing that happened with CB radios: You got truckers with kilowatt-rated amplifiers and no equipment certification; There's bleed over from one channel to the next, tons of static, and people running such ridiculously overpowered and marginally functional equipment that it makes sticking your head in a microwave look downright safe compared to sitting next to some of those rigs.
It happened with 802.11b, when we switched to g. Then n was released, and it oblitherated b and g. Then manufacturers released the "turbo" modes, which ate up even more bandwidth. And nevermind all the wireless keyboards, mice, phones, wireless gamer headsets, and home audio systems, all ALSO operating on the same frequencies, each using different encoding schemes. Pretty soon you've got hackers wiring up coax and tin cans, slapping on several watt amplifiers, raising the black flag and saying "Fuck da police!" and blasting a microwave beam 50 miles, and self-sterilizing their manhood from the near field RF...
Face it guys: We need regulated airspace. We need black vans. We need licensing, and a watchdog group so if someone doesn't play nice -- it's knock, knock, and goodbye offending equipment (and possibly neighbor). And we need to mandate sunsetting of equipment periodically to maintain inter-device compatibility and spectrum integrity.
The "wild wild west" wifi is a disaster in dense urban areas. You're lucky if you can get 20 feet from the router before the signal goes to hell in some places.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Name one application that needs multi-gigabit connection speeds on the client? Name one purely theoretical application that needs that kind of bandwidth? (Don't just propose insanely high res video, that's easy.)
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Wifi makes it a few hundred feet at best when traveling through walls and such, so you would need approximately one of these per house unless it was in an area with a lot of houses. Even if it would travel far enough to cover several houses, I doubt one router would be able to provide full speeds to more than one or two houses.
Overall, I doubt many providers would consider something like this to save a few hundred feet of wire into a customer's house. Some rural providers do offer wireless internet for the "last mile," but houses are much more spread out for these, so running individual cables to each house would be more cost prohibitive.
WiFi is a "last-inch" technology, not a "last-mile" technology. The high speeds you can get from consumer gear assume that there's little to no contention for the radio spectrum involved; if you're feeding an entire city block off a single access point, you've got several dozen people contending for that same chunk of bandwidth. If all of them decide to watch YouTube or whatever at the same time, that theoretical 600-megabit data rate drops down to maybe 5 half-duplex megabits per customer, as the weaknesses of a shared-medium network kick in.
You can work around the contention problem by increasing the number of base stations. If you've got one access point per house, each device talks to the nearest base station and has a stronger signal that keeps more distant devices from interfering, but you're back where you started, needing to run a wire to each house.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
Mostly because for most use cases it is identical, or close enough.
So, meh.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Or maybe just wifi that does not stop working everytime someone microwaves a burrito.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
The higher your frequency, the worse your range/penetration. You can see the difference even with 2.4GHz vs 5GHz. In my place, I can get full signal bars in my bedroom with 2.4GHz, but only 2 or so with 5GHz, from the same router. For a more extreme example look at the Navy's Seafarer system, which operated at 78Hz, and literally penetrated the entire earth, and compare it to visible light, which is 100s of THz, and is stopped by any solid substance.
60GHz does not have very good penetration.
Because getting Wifi to work over a full mile is pretty close to impossible. Hell, just within a building can be difficult.
I'm currently posting this over an unsecured Wifi network, because no ISP will return my calls about buying my own connection (probably because the apartment has contracted for "free" internet for everyone starting in a few weeks). It's within the same building, seemingly even on the same floor, and yet it's dodgy enough that I can't even watch Youtube videos most of the time, and my bandwidth is frequently displayed in kilobits per second.
Getting it to work throughout a neighborhood isn't going to happen, unless you can jack up the power to some absurd level. Or maybe outlaw microwaves (my connection is basically dead around 6:00PM when everyone nukes their supper.
If an entire city block was streaming video at the same time, you'd have HUGE problems, anyhow, because that cable and DSL service is shared, and heavily over-subscribed.
Besides, 5mbit is fast than what I'm getting at best right now. Wifi driving the price down allowing them to invest in more performance could only help.
And you're setting up a straw man, implying you have no choice between a single wifi channel per block, and an AP at every home.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I love how you contradict yourself from one sentence to the next... You say WiFi only goes 100', except for rural areas where it's cheap and works exactly like I've described, huh?
And as for speed, 802.11n gives 600Mbps. Except for the higest tier of FIOS internet service, that's ample bandwidth to share between numerous subscribers, without slowing you down at all.
And it's not like I'm making this stuff up... Large hotels, apartment complexes, office buildings, indoor and outdoor venues, all have been wired up with nothing but WiFi for the last mile. I've done a couple of those installations myself, using high powered WiFi repeaters to save tons of money over physical wiring otherwise needed, and still managing high speeds for hundreds of end-users.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Your tin-foil hats will finally be effective!
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
I used to work for a WISP (Wireless ISP).
They used 2.4 and 5GHz as well as the new 3.65GHz band (very narrow for now).
We often shot 13+ miles with off the shelf equipment.
Go look at ubnt.com, they have some cool TDMP stuff called AirMax.
You can't take the sky from me
They are via WiMAX:
Enhanced broadband to rural and remote areas
http://www.internode.on.net/residential/wireless_broadband/fixed-wireless/terms_and_conditions/#Equipment
The "WiMax receivers and base stations must be sufficiently cheap" is the key.
You have to get it right, at both ends - ie skilled people on site and thats not "cheap"
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
A mile is pushing it, but a $50 AP running DD-WRT can be configured as a wireless repeater. I've used high-power Buffalo units to do exactly that.
Microwaves only pose problems with a weak signal and ground-level receivers... Put the antenna on your roof, and you'll be able to use your microwave all you want.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I thought they were giant potatoes.
I dunno about you, but I have yet to see any potato with hair
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
IEEE 802.12 is not WLAN - it's 100BaseVG While that group may have been disbanded, IEEE 802 is their set of standards dealing w/ LANs and MANs, and then, the number after the period deals w/ different aspects of it, such as 1 for bridging, 3 for ethernet, 11 for WLAN (all the ones in b/w were used by other networking technologies, such as Token Bus, Fiber Optic TAG and so on, but are mostly currently disbanded.) IEEE 15 through 22 are the next active standards, but none having much to do w/ WLAN.
In a building you must go through walls. If WiFi was used for last mile, it wouldn't need to go through walls. Trees maybe, but the antenna would be on the outside of the house, so no walls.
With this level of bandwidth you could network a city (router to router directly, no ISP) and still get usable network speed.
I've seen over 20km on even 802.11a. With the right antennas and a good line of sight the stuff carries for long distances. I've got a very strong signal between two cheap parabolic antennas 250m apart, originally on g but now on n.
Depending on your situation, the signal range of WLAN can often be far to great. If you get WLAN to work only within a single room, you can have a new "cell" in every room. Which means you can have way more cells and serve more people at a higher bandwidth.
When you actually need more range, you can always use directional antennas. Of course 60 GHz is attenuated quite a bit by air, so it's certainly unsuitable for outside microwave links.
Actually that heavily depends on your ISP, while cable always is shared, DSL is not. Considering that most of the costs of DSL are at the last mile, good ISPs design their network so there will be no congestions in the typical peak hour of the day. And that is a moving target, a good ISP will upgrade their networks once it turns out more and more people are using streaming video.
Of course there are also ISPs run by people who want to squeeze every last penny out of the business.
How is 60GHz going to reach any relevant distance at all without frying my brain at the same time?
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
The problem isn't theoretical speed, it's congestion control for shared radio bandwidth when tens or hundreds of consumer owned unlicensed wireless devices stomp all over each other. In recent years, I've noticed that existing 802.11 devices in any reasonably densely populated area completely fall apart due to interference from neighbors.
No they wouldn't, because no ISP in an urban location would ever tell their users they need to connect to a tower 10Miles away. You notice I said "last mile" and not "last 20 miles". We're talking WiFi at the end of every block, or so, instead of dragging lines to every house, and having a $100 installer fees.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I used to have WiFi over a distance of 6.4 miles and now I have some CDMA-based crap that doesn't have enough frames for me to torrent. Nothing wrong with directional WiFi. You can use it on houses pretty close together, too, with directional antennae.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Actually that heavily depends on your ISP, while cable always is shared, DSL is not
I can't help think that this phrase was something repeated by ADSL providers. With cable, the last-mile connection is a bus, whereas it's a point-to-point link with ADSL, but in terms of consumer experience this has absolutely no impact. You aren't sharing a single 10Mb/s last-mile connection when you buy a 10Mb/s cable connection. With DOCSIS 3, you've got about 40-50Mb/s per channel (less for the US version than the European version due to 6MH` vs 8MHz channels), and you've got at least 4 channels, and likely quite a lot more. Your cable modem restricts you to using some smaller amount, but the total amount of last-mile bandwidth is often more than the number of subscribers per segment multiplied by their advertised speed.
Beyond the last hop, however, the situation is identical between ADSL and cable. A number of ADSL customers or a number of cable segments (each containing multiple customers) will be connected to the same link. The ratio between the amount of bandwidth available on the upstream link and the maximum amount of bandwidth that it's possible for all of the downstream users to try to use is somewhere between 1:10 and 1:50, depending on your ISP. 1:20 is usually a reasonable number, because different peak usage times mean that this level of service typically lets everyone saturate their link when they want to.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
It will only work where buildings are made of recycled toilet paper. A 60GHz signal will not pass through real walls.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
I'm sorry, but the DSLAM is typically connected via fibre. Unless your ISP is a cheapskate they are going to put in the minimal cost it takes up upgrade it so the peak utilisation (and that's what's relevant here) stays below 50%. Peak utilisation obviously rises with time, so the ISP needs to continuously upgrade their network. That's what I pay it for.
Bandwidth doesn't cost much when it comes via fibre. The difference between a Gigabit or 10 Gigabits is just a different module in your router. You can upgrade the line to the DSLAM trivially. Whereas once your segment is full, there's nothing (within reason) you can do against it. Even if you can split up your segment, chances are you need to do it somewhere on a roadside where you don't have any fibre.
BTW the data rates you see advertised on standards like DOCSIS are the maximum rates the standard is designed for. In reality it greatly depends how rotten your lines are and how badly maintained the amplifiers in between are. Just because a standard allows you to do QAM1024 it doesn't mean it'll actually work in real life.
if you're feeding an entire city block off a single access point, you've got several dozen people contending for that same chunk of bandwidth
Not to mention coverage issues, try asking someone who's installed wireless in a hotel how hard it is to get good coverage to every room. You will also have new pockets of interference and poor coverage every time someone adds their own AP for their non-WiFi Internet service. And even if the coverage is good, the stronger the signal the lower level of output does your mobile device require to operate which means longer battery life. That is very noticeable on a cell phone when I'm in the city center with full signal compared to being on the edge of coverage and my cell phone is shouting at max power to be heard. There's no such thing as a too strong wireless signal, "spot" service that reaches only the devices it needs with a high localized signal strength is the ideal for the home. On the go there's 3G/LTE+++ for different needs.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
They arent transmitting with regular antenna tho. WISP's require directional antennas, that they be pointed in the right direction, and little to no obstructions. Its actually highly similar to satellite 'cept without the whole space thing. Of course the equipment is "off the shelf" .. its just not the shelf that people are familiar with (walmart, staples, etc..)
"His name was James Damore."
OP needs to move his router to the middle of his house, at a high spot on the 2nd floor, maybe 3rd. When I had a 2 story house I put my g router at the top center of the 2nd floor, and not only got great reception all around the house, I got it all around the block.
Leaving your router on the floor under your desk is a great way to get lousy performance!
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
10kbps wifi is practically useless when you only have 11 channels. There will almost always be more than 11 users within a few miles, and at 10kbps they will all be using the channels at close to 100%. Congestion will kill your throughput. In addition, the temptation for someone to come up with a 110kbps 11-channel device will be impossible to resist, and running one of those will kill it for everybody else. The same goes for 1Mbps for an office complex, that is completely inadequate with the number of channels we have today.
No, we need to move up in frequency to get more channels and use power and antenna design to fix the range problems. Already, 5GHz has quite good range in practice, as one bar of signal strength often gives you 20Mbps or more of bandwidth. Of course your device is likely to see the lovely 3 bars of 2.5GHz coverage and jump there instead, only to be stuck with a lousy congested 1Mbps channel.
Allowing everyone to run their own multi-mile cells with indoor coverage is not currently doable in any frequency band. It is also fairly stupid, the likelihood is that most of the traffic is to/from the Internet, so why send the signal for miles instead of just hitting a nearby AP?
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
Why are we all still tied to wires?
Because WiFi is still half-duplex, similar to hubs that many of us used in the mid-90's. 802.11ac starts to address some of the of the simplex issues by placing users on individual spatial streams within a channel, but the communication between the client and the access point is still half-duplex, it's just somewhat isolated from other clients connected to the same AP...
The other major issue is that WiFi is still using ISM frequencies... 900MHz was squashed before WiFi was prevalent, 2.4GHz is squashed now, and with Apple finally putting a 5GHz radio in the iPhone, 5GHz will be a mess in the next few years... though with higher throughput, higher bandwidth and lower signal propogation, 5GHz will be more manageable.
The whole conversation is somewhat moot though, as 802.11ac has yet to be ratified.
Never trust anyone who takes pride in being called a 'geek'....
The fact that you are incompetent with WiFi is irrelevant, and assuming your experience to be an accurate reflection of the best the technology can do, is pure nonsense.
The fact remains that innumerable hotels, apartment complexes, office buildings, campgrounds, and more, have all been very effectively served by WiFi, without any of the problems you suggest are inherent difficulties.
Yes, for the most part... but it requires ample maintenance just to keep it there. Verizon isn't deploying FTTH because it's faster, they're doing it because of lower maintenance costs.
And installation fees exist because an installer actually has to come to your home, and ensure that you've got, eg. coax wired to your house, and with a proper S/N ratio. Plenty of people have DSL / Cable co personnel coming to their homes repeatedly, to fix issues with the lines. You can suggest whatever you want, but it's well known to be one of the most costly portions of providing service to the general public.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
That's quite true, and DSL providers got successfully sued for their misleading TV commercials about the subject (circa 2002 IIRC).
But to be fair, you do miss one point... DSL appeared on the scene BEFORE DOCSIS, so many of the people who had cable modems before 2002 or so, had no other speed limit than contention with other users. So there was SOME little bit of truth in the ads.
And indeed, while DSL providers were advertising about contention on Cable Modems, they were hooking up DOZENS of DSLAMs to a single T-1 line.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
This has to be some of the worst versioning ever - it's been decades(?) and we're still on sub-letters of 802.11 . When does it go to 802.12 (or heaven forbid, 803?)
That's only even POSSIBLE on the most up-to-date cable infrastructure. I've seen it, but that's the rare exception, NOT the rule. Damn near all cable co's MUST, at a bare minimum, drive out to the POP to swap FILTERS on the coax line.
Seriously, dude, move out of your parent's basement, already, and see how things work out in the real world.
But I'm done arguing. It's clear you know jack shit about what you speak, and keep backpedaling constantly. Goodbye.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant