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Wireless Networking Hardware Technology

IEEE Developments in Wireless Networking 79

Posted by Zonk from the how-to-talk-to-the-eather dept.
JamesAlfaro writes "After much wrangling between opposing interests among the members of the IEEE, a first draft for the Wi-Fi IEEE 802.11n specification received approval in a Thursday meeting. Final ratification of the standard is not expected until next year." Relatedly, judgecorp writes "The IEEE has disbanded its working group on ultrawideband. They are leaving the marketplace to decide between two competing approaches." From the article: "Freescale, first to the market with UWB products, believes its headstart will give it a long-term victory, while WiMedia, with the backing of industry heavyweights including Intel and Microsoft, reckons its punch will eventually win through, even without a formal IEEE standard."
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IEEE Developments in Wireless Networking More

IEEE Developments in Wireless Networking

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  • Wait faster (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 20, 2006 @10:33AM (#14518587)
    So now I can wait on the hotel's 1.544 DSL line even faster?
    • Longer range would be a bonus (article mentions 50% improvement), but why bother with a 600 Mbps standard? The vast majority of users are on 728 kbps DSL or 3 Mbps cable. Even most LAN's are 100 Mbps and will be for several years, at least. Even then, no one except the most specialized users would have any need to exceed 54 Mbps. Is this standard really worth the effort and expense, not just of drafting the standard, but also fielding compliant equipment?
      • Some places in this world you can actually get on a 1Gbps shared network. At times, the 600Mbps per access point might be genuinely useful.

  • Pre-n compatiblity (Score:2, Interesting)

    by SeanMon ( 929653 )
    Are the various 802.11 "Pre-n" routers compatible with the draft standard? That would be unfortunate if they aren't, because they are rather expensive compared to b/g ones.
    • This is the exact same thing that happened with 802.11g. The companies get their pre-spec routers out there while the spec is being finalized, and then when the spec is finalized they release a firmware update for the equipment to bring it in line with the spec.
      • However, I have read some articles that are saying the hardware in pre-n equipment may not even be compatible with pre-n. If the hardware won't work with it then a firmware update won't help.
        • Ahhhh. I haven't read that. If that's the case, then yes, the hardware manufacturers are just shooting themselves in the foot. They'd better allow for a free tradein/swap if their pre-n routers aren't compatible with the final spec.

          • Re:Pre-n compatiblity (Score:3, Informative)

            by jimicus ( 737525 )
            They'd better allow for a free tradein/swap if their pre-n routers aren't compatible with the final spec.

            Like they have so many times in the past, yes?

            </sarcasm>

          • Re:Pre-n compatiblity (Score:4, Informative)

            by amazon10x ( 737466 ) on Friday January 20, 2006 @11:14AM (#14518877)
            I found a page about being unable to upgrade the firmware to fix it:

            http://www.thechannelinsider.com/article2/0,1895,1 754056,00.asp [thechannelinsider.com]

            Towards the end of the article:
            Making matters even more problematic is that, unlike 802.11g, where many early devices could be upgraded to the real standard with a firmware upgrade, that's less likely to be the case with the pre-N MIMO devices, depending on who wins the standard war.

            • I bought a Pre-n WiFi card to use with my g network. It was one of the ones that Netgear knew would be incompatible with the new spec, so it was really cheap. Basically, I got an 802.11g card with a great antenna for next to nothing. I don't feel ripped off.
          • Oh please, when is the last time someone lied to you in order to sell you something? I saw a Belkin display at MacWorld, and I asked the salesperson if their pre-n router would be upgradable to fully 802.11n compliant - just to see if they would be honest about it. Of course they weren't. Somehow I doubt the extra sales will shoot them in the foot.
    • I work in the networking industry. Certain companies came out with wonderful "Pre-N" marketing gimmickery in order to sell products. However, the rest of the industry was mostly appaled by this naming, because most if not all products labaled as "Pre-N" have little to no chance of being upgraded to 802.11n standards, due to the hardware limitations of these devices.

      I think a lot of customers will be disspaointed when they discover this, perhaps having bought this equipment under false pretenses.

  • Think of the consumers! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by plbland ( 922595 ) on Friday January 20, 2006 @10:36AM (#14518602) Homepage
    I think it would be quite nice if they could at least co-operate to some degree with these UWB WiFi technologies. It's easy for the /. crowd to understand these compatibility issues but it can only be hassle for the general consumer who barely understand the current wireless standards/speeds.
    • Not to disrespect what you're saying, but most consumers don't need to understand this stuff. And they probably don't want to.

      They just want it to work. Which is why we now have wireless A/B/G routers and NICs, so that it doesn't matter what flavor you buy.

      Once a technology matures, it should work as effortlessly as magic for the end user. Which is why so many people do not use WEP/WAP on their access point.
  • Albert: You gonna say somethin? They're arguing 'bout you.
    Pogo: Ever see two dogs fight over a bone?
    Albert: yea
    Pogo: Ever see the bone fight back?

    Albert looks thoughful.

  • How bout *Nix support for 'b' ??? (Score:3, Funny)

    by smokestacklightning ( 550330 ) on Friday January 20, 2006 @10:39AM (#14518629)
    Great, another wireless standard whose lack of *nix Driver support will undoubtedly make my machine act all twitchy ...

    How about out-of-the-box *nix support that doesn't involve me devoting my spare time, work hours and waking moments getting it to run, or run as it should ...

    Ran with NDISWrapper for a long time on my laptop, gave up after my last upgrade when Ubuntu dicked me. Now I've just got this really long, really sad cat5 cable that follows me around the house... My dog thinks it's his pal ...
    • After installing opensuse 10.0 on my Acer Aspire 3500 notebook my wireless g version worked fine. Sure there is issues, but what OS doesn't. I think we are only 1 year away from wireless cards been support like ethernet cards are. Keep programming for the gnu gpl!

    • Unobtanium, Inc. (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      That would take a hardware company built from the ground up to use open source. Yes, it is needed, for video cards, audio, wireless, etc. All of the above. I know of some minimal efforts, but nothing really stands out except in obscure embedded. We need a white knight, something like a google/ibm blend to do this. It would be nice if it started from scratch, and had an IPO to get funding to get going. I am not sure if it would work, but with enough pre release advertising it might. Despite Linux being in us
    • <rose-colored glasses>
      Got to have some manufacturers with enough sack to GPL the driver.
      Then, the market needs to buy lots of them, so that the video chip and hard drive manufacturers will also get the clue.
      Loadshedding these godforsaken software patents will certainly abet the effort, but that front takes serious political will.
      Summary: economic and political effort required, golden future to follow.
      </rose-colored glasses>
      • Look, some of us are busy trying to create prior art on this thing called a "time machine"

        Some asshat in the future locked up all the patents and now one company has the market cornered.

        So, while you're busy complaining about GPL *nix drivers for some technology that is going to be irrelevant in 20 years, I had to travel back to this stinkin' era to try and change the world.

        And FYI - yes patents will still be around in 1,500 years.

        P.S. I'm not telling you who wins the SuperBowl. I saw Back To The Future, I
    • Intel has open source wireless drivers, open source graphics drivers, etc. Their technology tends to lag behind the cutting edge, but maybe that's the price of freedom.
    • It's funny how the free software kernel of choice (Linux) doesn't have as good support for wireless cards as the dead grandmother (FreeBSD).
    • Go buy the 3.99$ kit from best buy that has a g router and 2 g usb keys. They come out of the box with linux drivers and a link to a site on sourceforge where you can update them/ contribute. The brand is called Blanc (Im in canada btw) and Its a special thats been on since boxing day. Only problem is the router doesnt support static dhcp mappings but nothing my linux box cant handle.

      • care to share a link on that one? maybe the brand? i picked up a dlink wireless combo at best buy on black friday for around 15$ iirc. the 80211.g router took a bit to setup like my old 802.11b belkin router. i have to assign static ip's to all the internal machines before they'll route outside the network. i also now have a dwl-g122 usb 802.11g card that i haven't gotten to work at all under linux.

        i have a laptop with an internal card, broadcom iirc. it works fine with ndiswrapper. i have another lap
    • How about out-of-the-box *nix support that doesn't involve me devoting my spare time, work hours and waking moments getting it to run, or run as it should ...

      Ran with NDISWrapper for a long time on my laptop, gave up after my last upgrade when Ubuntu dicked me.

      Just got my D-Link DWL-G520 running on Ubuntu 5.10. Didn't work with 5.04, but I was going to upgrade anyway. No problems at all. Now, on the Windows (98SE) side of the same box, well, I'd put the card in before installing the drivers. Major no-no.

  • Subspace Communication within the S-T Continuum! (Score:3, Funny)

    by digitaldc ( 879047 ) on Friday January 20, 2006 @10:40AM (#14518636)
    Another technology called Space Time Block Coding (STBC) will reduce signal dropout by using multiple antennas for redundancy.

    I knew all those years of Star Trek would eventually lead to every day applications.
    Now we can use our wireless routers for subspace communication [nasa.gov] with strange new worlds and new life forms, and boldly route where no one has routed before.

  • Not needed for VoIP (Score:3, Insightful)

    by hey ( 83763 ) on Friday January 20, 2006 @10:45AM (#14518669) Journal
    Its cool and all that they are making a faster standard but the article says:

    This technology in particular is key to enhancing the VoIP user experience.

    I get 54Mbps on WiFi now. That's more than fast enough for VoIP.

    • I remember using voice chat rooms best part of a decade ago, so yeah VoIP is basic so far as bandwidth needs. I expect they're using "VoIP" as the trendy name for chat in general (c.f. mp3 vs. audio file) and thinking of conferencing like iChat AV with multiple video streams but higher resolution so that you can see useful stuff rather than just have the pleasure of seeing a moving face.

    • Re:Not needed for VoIP (Score:5, Informative)

      by tpgp ( 48001 ) on Friday January 20, 2006 @11:11AM (#14518860) Homepage
      I get 54Mbps on WiFi now. That's more than fast enough for VoIP.

      Throughput is not the only requirements for VOIP.

      From the article:
      Another technology called Space Time Block Coding (STBC) will reduce signal dropout by using multiple antennas for redundancy.

      This technology in particular is key to enhancing the VoIP user experience.
      The article also mentions power management improvements (for devices running on batteries - like cell phones), longer range and better collision management.

      Together, these would make a significant difference to VOIP - even if Mbps were lower.

    • Re:Not needed for VoIP (Score:2, Informative)

      by Epicyon ( 777863 )
      Current wifi is sufficient for a single user on a single AP. However, with the current environment there is no provision for QoS in the shared media environment. VoIP requires consistent data delivery for a good user experience which is provided through QoS. It's not purely a matter of bandwidth.
    • Actually, you don't. Throughput on a wireless connection is never more than 50% of the total medium, and even then you'd be lucky to get 22.5Mbps...
      • VoIP has extremely small bandwidth requirements - something on the line of 25kbps IP bandwidth per stream. The main consideration is QoS. Getting the diffserv header in those packets marked as Voice 6 and enabling seamless roaming are what make everything run smoothly. Extra Mbps are meaningless until you hit the enterprise level. Even then you would really have to hammer your internal network and would still have to deal with your Internet bottleneck.

    • Re:Not needed for VoIP (Score:3, Informative)

      by fwr ( 69372 )
      No you don't. No one gets 54Mbps throughput on 802.11a/b/g wireless. That may be the advertized rate, but it's not your typical or even maximum bandwidth.

      Still, you are correct that even 802.11b at low speeds is good enought for VoIP as far as throughput. It's more SNR and the (lack of real) QoS that are the problems areas.

  • Remember Modems? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by drewzhrodague ( 606182 )
    With so many (or so few?) standards, I think over time we'll have devices that speak most, some, or all of these protocols. We had the same thing with the old-style telephone modems, the 16.8 HST, and early pseudo-56Ks. What I want is more public bandwidth. Will the FCC dedicate a TV channel to the public? Will that help our wireless Internet?
    • What I want is more public bandwidth.

      Have you even touched the 5GHz U-NII band that the FCC gave you?
      • What I want is some wireless broadband tech that is capable of working without LOS, over appreciable distances. The telco monopolies are never going to give up their stranglehold on their copper, and even if they someday drag fiber around everywhere you know they are gojng to charge through the nose for it, and still keep it under tight monopoly control. Its time to bypass them,

  • Great, just great.... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by 10Ghz ( 453478 ) on Friday January 20, 2006 @10:47AM (#14518697)
    More technologies that do the same thing, yet are incompatible with each other. "Oh, we'll let the market sort this one out". translation: "MWAHAHAHAHAA! Screw the consumers! It's up to the little guy to figure this one out, because we will have nothing to do with it!".
    • "Freescale, first to the market with UWB products, believes its headstart will give it a long-term victory, while WiMedia, with the backing of industry heavyweights including Intel and Microsoft, reckons its punch will eventually win through, even without a formal IEEE standard"

      Emphasis mine... why do those companies and non-adherence to standards not surprise me?

    • So is the IEEE now just a bunch of guys sitting around a table bickering?

      These disputes could be solved by empirical testing. I thought the last E in IEEE meant something.

  • I'd abandon ultra-wideband too (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The practical problems with ultra-wideband are huge. This is probably a technology that should be approached incrementally rather than all at once.

    We've played with an ultra-wideband RF link in the lab. It's not pretty. Between the top of the band and the bottom of the band, the propagation changes a lot. Ditto for the noise profile. We used discone antennas (because they are inherently wideband) but those aren't practical for mobile use.

    We were successful in the lab for low data rates but, of course,
    • Discone antenna?
      http://www.spaziolink.com/wi-fi/Discone.jpg [spaziolink.com]

      Sounds like the Coneheads [imdb.com] were ahead of their time.

      To get serious for a moment, maybe the wireless industry should invest more computer time/money on 'evolving' antenna designs. [boingboing.net]

      I don't think anyone would have designed that antenna in their wildest dream.
    • How did this first poster get modded up? And Informative?

      Lets get some facts straight:
      UWB has been around since the early 1950's when the military started developing it. It is ACTUALLY a simplier radio than an 802.11 radio, and has one huge advantage; the power needed for the TX operation is less than the power needed for RX. This is huge plus in the mobile market where power == life. There are also great advantages in security as UWB is a LPI and LPD technology.

      CES for your information had some great
      • Lets get some facts straight:
        UWB has been around since the early 1950's when the military started developing it. It is ACTUALLY a simplier radio than an 802.11 radio,

        While we're getting facts straight...

        Actually there were TWO major types of UWB being considered by the IEEE group. One I'd characterize as an orthogonal-wavelet direct-sequence spread spectrum approach, plowsharing older military tech, which appears to be the one you're describing. The other was a orthogonal-frequency-division-multiplexing a

  • Relevant UWB Link (Score:4, Informative)

    by writertype ( 541679 ) on Friday January 20, 2006 @12:08PM (#14519319)
    Given that the CNET link above seems tied to the 802.11n standard, here's a link on the whole IEEE UWB story, from ExtremeTech.

    UWB Standards Group Calls It Quits " [extremetech.com]

    Unable to resolve a deadlock between two competing proposals, the IEEE working group responsible for the ultrawideband technology threw in the towel Thursday.

    The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 802.15.3a task group (TG3a), which oversaw the formation of the UWB standard agreed to withdraw the Jan. 2003 project authorization request that formed the group. Instead, the two competing technologies - MB-OFDM, championed by the Intel-led WiMedia Forum, and DS-UWB, promoted by Freescale Semiconductor and its UWB Forum - will be left to fight it out in the marketplace.

  • It references a page that makes no mention of the IEEE disbanding the UWB group?!?

    ]{

  • Faster then 100 mbit? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by tecker ( 793737 ) on Friday January 20, 2006 @01:14PM (#14519891) Homepage
    If I am correct in thinking that "pre-n" and the new 802.11n will be faster then 100mbits that most people have in their house.This article shows that over the air will be 200mbps+ and the MAC SAP would peg out at 100mbps. [deviceforge.com]

    That is all well and good for corperate environments that need network access to programs from a server but seriously. This speed is 40 times faster then the connection I have at home for my internet. Unless you are doing things over your home network (Streaming video I suppose) there is no reason to upgrade.

    The trouble is that theses companies will be pushing "N" routers like crazy when noone needs it. Unless it offers super Encryption of 802.11i [wikipedia.org] then count me out.

    • I recently had this discussion with a Wireless engineer from Cisco. He stated that one of the big pushes for 802.11n will be the home entertainment market. He also hinted at this being one of the major reasons for Cisco purchasing Scientific Atlantic (they make set top boxes).
    • Oh so you never like to transfer large files to your laptop? Or make backups to the network? Or do any kind of bulk transfer that rsync can't cover effectively? Any time I have to do a large transfer, I have to hook my laptop up to the ethernet, because it's a lot faster, and does approach wire speed (unlike wireless).

      I'm sure they said the same thing before 100baseTX was ubiquitous.
    • Well, what I like is the possibility of better range, power efficiency and reliability by using several signals through several antennas and processing those signals relative to each other to get much higher accuracy. An analogy would be the effect of having two eyes, compensating each others flaws, and perceiving 3D.

      If you just let ping loop for a while on a 802.11 connection today, you will most probably see a few packets with very high turnaround. Anything that could rule those out, even in noisy settin

  • I can't help but think if this is going to be a waste. Sure, 802.11n may have a theoretical data-transfer rate of 502 mb/s, but I doubt that consumer lines are going to increase that much in bandwidth. The current standard supports up to 54 mb/s, which should be plenty for years to come.

    Some extra reading:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/802.11n#802.11n [wikipedia.org] -- 802.11n Standard
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WiMax [wikipedia.org] -- The New, utra-wide range, wifi standard

    • Last year I upgraded my home network to something faster than 802.11b. Even though my cable internet provider is providing download speeds significantly lower than the about 5 mpbs transfer speeds I get with 802.11b. So why did I upgrade? Because I do a lot of large file transfers between computers on my home network. I have done some contract work setting up networks for small businesses where they also have to transfer large files between servers and workstations. A wireless standard that transfers files
  • Sitting beside me now are four new-in-box Intel Pro/Wireless 5000 [intel.com] wireless access points.

    PC Magazine, 5/21/2002 [pcmag.com]:
    "...optional support for 802.11b and a reasonable price make the Intel PRO/Wireless 5000 802.11a Access Point worthy of consideration if you want to be an early adopter of 802.11a."

    C|Net, 7/31/2002 [cnet.com]:
    "With its simultaneous support of 802.11a and 802.11b, the Intel Pro/Wireless 5000 LAN dual access point is well suited to open office areas packed with wireless PCs."

    2002 price: $449 list according to
  • I've used many different setups of 802.11g and I've never seen it do more than a sustained 2.8mbytes a second.

    That's 22.4mbits, NEVER have I seen .11g beat that - even with immense overhead I can't seem to see how they claim it's 54mbit?

    Does anyone know what the deal is? I wouldn't be susprised if this 300mbit standard is only just as fast as ethernet.

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