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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.
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
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.
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.
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
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
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.
With this level of bandwidth you could network a city (router to router directly, no ISP) and still get usable network speed.
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
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.
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