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Intel Cuts Cord On Its Current Cord-Cutting WiGig Products (zdnet.com)
An anonymous reader shares a ZDNet report, which also has some clarification from Intel: It looks like you can add WiGig wireless docking to Intel's dustbin (along with IoT products axed earlier this summer), as the company has discontinued existing products using the 802.11ad wireless standard, according to Anandtech. [Since publishing this report, we've received a statement from Intel clarifying its WiGig support: "We continue to offer current versions of our 802.11ad products, such as the Intel Tri-band Wireless AC 18265 and Gigabit Wireless 10101R antenna module. We remain committed to WiGig and think it has exciting potential for a number of applications, including enabling VR to become wireless, mesh networking and as part of Intel's leading products for 5G."] WiGig was developed several years ago with faster speeds than then-current Wi-Fi standards, but because it relied on the 60GHz channel, its high throughput could only travel over short distances. As a result, it eventually became marketed as a feature for wireless laptop docking stations, and while it received some support from enterprise laptop manufactures like Dell and Lenovo, the technology didn't make a big dent against standard wired laptop docks.
Any setback for Intel is a win for the world.
If leasing Internet Of Shit devices is the way to go.
You can switch to something new every time your existing devices are orphaned...
As a result, it eventually became marketed as a feature for wireless laptop docking stations, and while it received some support from enterprise laptop manufactures like Dell and Lenovo, the technology didn't make a big dent against standard wired laptop docks.
I can't help but chuckle whenever I see "support" and "Lenovo" in the same sentence.
So, a non-docking docking station???
WTF is the point of that?
Are you being intentional obtuse or going for a jab of sarcasm? A "dock" to plug all my desktop bound peripherals that I don't actually need to plug in to my laptop when I get home is actually kind of cool. Perhaps he we actually called it a "hub" just for you then?
This sounds like a good idea if it could be used along with wireless power, and if it can really provide sufficient bandwidth.
If I could have a pad that I could set my laptop on, and suddenly be able to use an external monitor, keyboard, and wired ethernet, all while charging the laptop, that would be a big win. Especially if it's a widely supported standard, so the docking pad won't become obsolete when I buy a new laptop.
But what should really sell is a good wireless standard for conference room projectors, especially one that would let people display presentations from phones, and one that really just worked all the time. Companies would buy them by the truckload with just a hint of marketing effort.
It's not going to be any more trivial using light than 60 GHz. You think mmWave is directional, try a laser beam.
Radio is just plain wrong for massive data bandwidths
Light is radio at a different frequency. Light has more bandwidth at its higher frequencies compared to radio, but there is also a lot of occurring interference... We tend to have a lot of it in the same areas that you'd want to use light to transmit data. Visible modulating light would also be annoying as hell - in the past it's been IR... which brings me to:
The ONLY reason light isn't used is because light hasn't been used in the past, save for remote control units.
I assume you are very young? I say this because the main technology used for wireless communication of computers and related equipment was IR. Everything - laptops, PDAs, phones - had an IrDA port. It worked, but it was not fast and the line-of-sight requirement was a pain. There are researchers trying to make IR systems faster, but it's not a trivial problem. If they can get it working, the bandwidth would be gigabit-class.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Visible modulating light would also be annoying as hell
I hate to tell you this, but your LEDs are likely to be awfully flickering in the 100kHz range. Some as low as 10kHz (and some just dispense with that part of the driver circuit and flicker at 100Hz or 120Hz, but let us disregard those).
It would be tricky to get more than one bit per flicker out of light that just shines around without being in a proper fiber, so to get e.g. 1Gbps out of it you'd need to flicker at 1GHz. Good luck telling that apart from the 100kHz flicker you are already dealing with.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
Yeah. That would be awesome at work to just set my laptop down and have everything connected.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
The concept had its uses(though, without some wireless charging arrangement, the utility of a 'dock' that made your laptop battery drain a bit faster(because running that multi-Gb wireless link isn't free) was always a bit troublesome.
For the things that already have reasonably sane and standardized 'over-IP' or bluetooth flavors; a wireless dock doesn't make a whole lot of sense because 'no dock' is pretty close to a wireless dock: you just dump your laptop on your desk, wifi connection handles network, file shares, printers; bluetooth peripherals reconnect in pretty short order when you come into range and you are 'docked'.
The Intel 60GHz thing(it was a pair of SKUs, one card for adding support to the client system, plus the W13100 "Wireless Gigabity Sink" part designed to build a docking station around) was aimed mostly at shoving the interfaces without good wireless abstractions over a wireless link: video(yes, 'airplay', 'miricast', etc. can do an OK job of 'wireless display' by sending an H.264 stream to a device that expects it; but they don't work with dumb monitors; and don't tend to work with software that isn't explicitly expecting them; so they aren't really an option for the "dump laptop in dock, receive dual monitors" use case) USB(there are various vendor specific hacks; but unless the USB device can be shared out at a higher level, like a printer or a mass storage device, there isn't really network-transparent USB support; the USB network extenders that do exist can be pretty dodgy and generally require fiddly drivers) and ethernet(probably the least useful for end users; since wifi is a direct substitute; but when IT wants to PXE boot...)
Even so, the niche was pretty limited, when you could get the same features, plus charging, for less money(and without a fan in your docking station; most models had a nice noisy 60mm, users loved that) in exchange for going to slightly more effort and mechanically docking. Plus, while fast, the WiGig link wasn't fast enough for fully transparent transport of things like video; and range was severely compromised if line of sight wasn't available. Plus, there were some very unpleasant Gen1 quirks and power management bugs, depending on the model.
Not really a surprise that it didn't do so well. It did offer capabilities that other things didn't(and still don't); but wired docks were doing all of that better and cheaper, with charging; and since the arrangement relied on the 60GHz radio(I'm not sure if falling back to the more usual wifi bands just wasn't implemented, or didn't offer nearly enough bandwidth to handle things like dock video without egregious compression; either way it wasn't an option); you had to be pretty close to the docking station for it to work, so the extra effort of mechanical docking was limited.
If it had gained broader acceptance; it probably could have been a winning 'enterprise' equivalent of miricast/airplay for conference room video and the like; but since those work with mostly cheap and common hardware at the expense of some relatively minor H.264 artifacts, they are a hard target for an expensive, model specific, fancy interconnect to compete with. For docking; things were bad enough with the various proprietary(but mostly functional) docks sold with 'business' laptops since forever; and they are worse now that TB3 and USB-C allow you to get full dock bandwidth out of a single connector.
I don't mean that you could see the flickering - I mean that there would be this persistent light shining right at you as long as data was transmitting.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Yes the technology only works when the office lights are on. In a lot of offices, that is the majority of the time.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
I think you are referring to a theoretical technology whereas I am talking about something you could do today. If you want to integrate high-speed visible light data transmission into office lighting, that may very well be a wonderful replacement for WiFi in many settings. But that is currently not possible - certainly nothing you could buy today. Today what is possible is point-source LEDs.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
I'm fed up with everything being "exciting".
Actually the 60 GHz band was selected precisely because the propagation loss is especially high here which reduces interference between adjacent users. Even though transmit powers must be higher for a given range and data rate the higher loss still translates into smaller adjacent user interference once you're outside of the range.
The problem is that it's challenging (i.e. expensive) to get useful range at this high frequency at high data rates where generating power is more difficult and where the propagation loss is higher.
There's no need to use a laser beam, you can use an omnidirectional light and superimpose a small signal which is invisible to the eye on top of room lighting. LEDs can be use but the data rate is lower. Laser diodes are actually being explored for lighting, they are already used in some car headlights and maybe other specialized applications, and they will support gigabit modulation rates.