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Wireless Networking Intel Hardware

Intel Demonstrates 220Mbps Variant of UWB 70

Posted by CowboyNeal from the look-ma-no-wires dept.
MattyIce writes "InfoWorld has a story about a yet to be approved standard for a high-speed, short distance communications standard. Last year, Intel demonstrated 100MBPS speeds but they have bumped the speed up to 220MBPS this time." Fast stuff, but I imagine it'll be a long time before it comes to market. I haven't even upgraded my wireless network to 802.11g yet!
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Intel Demonstrates 220Mbps Variant of UWB More

Intel Demonstrates 220Mbps Variant of UWB

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  • Technology (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 12, 2003 @08:34AM (#5715812)
    Technology keeps outdating itself... but some people can never accept it.

    My $1000 486 10 years ago has seen a 99.9% decrease in value.

    This $20 book [ebay.com] published in 1998 has some idiot trying to get $5 out of it.

    I've seen organizations rent computers for $30/month/each just to escape this madness.

    • Re:Technology (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I think it's an open source businessmodel!

      1: Write free software.
      2: ?
      3: Bump up from 100MBPS to 220MBPS.
      4: Profit!
    • Good thing no one is standing over you with a club telling you to always be bleeding edge. (Well maybe some people have to deal with that but I don't.) I look at all these new shiny toys and think, thats great but my 802.11b still works for my purposes. My 2 year old computer is still good for my needs. Until they aren't, I'll stick with the old stuff.
    • I'll give you 5$ for it. :) Still you can build a firewall out of it so all is not lost.

  • Another name (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 12, 2003 @08:37AM (#5715817)
    a high-speed, short distance communications standard. isn't that called shouting?

  • How far does it go? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by 192939495969798999 ( 58312 ) <info AT devinmoore DOT com> on Saturday April 12, 2003 @08:39AM (#5715820) Homepage Journal
    Exactly how far away does this thing work? Does it go through walls, etc? I have never tried a wireless network, yeah I know... stuck in a cave!

    • Re:How far does it go? (Score:4, Informative)

      by yehim1 ( 462046 ) on Saturday April 12, 2003 @09:06AM (#5715876) Journal
      Judging from the frequency of this network, between 3.1GHz and 10.6GHz, the distance must be limited to the size of a PAN (personal area network). The article puts how useful it is to replace bluetooth as the medium of transfer for PANs (also, it solves the conflict between bluetooth 802.11b, since they use the frequency bands).

      Perhaps one day we'll be able to synchronize our ipods over this connections; it beats connecting the firewire cable anytime! I can even put the ipod in the pocket. Something that we can already accomplish with bluetooh, minus the available bandwidth (and also minimizes interference with WLAN networks).

      For longer radius of operation, 802.11a is suggested to be used (for example between buildings).

      • The frequency has nothing to do with distance. 802.11a's 5Ghz is almost squarely in the middle of the range you quote yet good adapters can get ~100ft indoors and even more outdoors in unobstructed areas.
        • Actually, frequency does have something to do with range. Not proprotionally, but as it relates to the material in the environment. As 802.11b operates in the 2.1Ghz spectrum, which is the same frequency range that your microwave oven operates in, range is suseptable to environmental effects that many people do not think of.

          A microwave oven generally works by oscilating the water mollecules in the food you are putting in their path. It is reasonable to assume then that as the amount of water in the air inc
          • Actually .11b is 2.4Ghz and microwave ovens work by putting several hundred to well over a thousand watts of energy into a tiny space, it has nothing to do with resonant frequencies (not sure how many times I have seen this myth corrected). .11b actually has a fairly low rain fade rate with decent equipment (for instance Cisco bridges with directional antennas). .11a does have problems penetrating cement block though due to wavelength issues.
    • Yeah, too many words in the article, better ask someone to repeat the important parts. Two minutes reading is just TOO LONG.

  • So? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Dark Lord Seth ( 584963 ) on Saturday April 12, 2003 @08:39AM (#5715821) Journal

    When can I use my HDs merely by putting them within 1 meter of my comp? Screw those stupid & ugly flat cables, I want a nice, clean and wireless solution for this and I'm pretty sure allot of people with me.

    • Re:So? (Score:1, Funny)

      by m1chael ( 636773 )
      you would hope the range is only one metre or you may not be the only one watching your porn.

    • Re:So? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by evilviper ( 135110 )
      I don't understand the desire for wireless. You need to get power from somewhere, so they best you can hope for is a small, simple cable connecting things.

      So, get Firewire hard drives, and you should be set.

  • Well ... (Score:4, Informative)

    by TwistedKestrel ( 550054 ) <twistedkestrel@gmail.com> on Saturday April 12, 2003 @08:42AM (#5715827) Journal
    I haven't even upgraded my wireless network to 802.11g yet!


    IEEE hasn't even ratified 802.11g yet!

  • MBPS vs Mbps (Score:5, Informative)

    by Skreech ( 131543 ) on Saturday April 12, 2003 @08:42AM (#5715828)
    The article is talking about megabits (Mbps), not megabytes (MBps) as mentioned above. Capitalization matters on that acronym.

  • Lynchpin for adoption? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Quarters ( 18322 ) on Saturday April 12, 2003 @08:46AM (#5715836)
    Fast stuff, but I imagine it'll be a long time before it comes to market. I haven't even upgraded my wireless network to 802.11g yet!

    The time to market for new wireless technology is connected to your personal networking topology exactly how?

  • Now you can buy cable from this guy [ultra-fast...-light.com] that allows communications faster than light! A mere $325.00/1m, what a bargain! (It seems that Mathew Orman figured out where Einstein was wrong. [But don't they all?])

  • Wireless means Freedom, but cables are cheap&g (Score:4, Interesting)

    by forged ( 206127 ) on Saturday April 12, 2003 @09:01AM (#5715860) Homepage Journal
    Just earlier today I bought a FireWire 6-to-6 pins cable to plug two of my PC's back-to-back, since they're otherwise on different VLANs (one on VPN to work ond one directly on the ADSL link for personal stuff). That worked really nicely, and I'm now experiencing the joy of transfering stuff 4x faster than FastEthernet between the two machines. Cost of the cable: 25 EUR.

  • What a UWB device is and how it works. (Score:5, Informative)

    by fejrskov ( 664451 ) <martin AT fejrskov DOT dk> on Saturday April 12, 2003 @09:01AM (#5715861)
    Originally the term "Ultra Wide Band" designated a special modulation technique but in February 2003 the FCC approved a standard to define UWB-communication as a communication with a minimal 10-dB bandwidth of 20% of the center frequency.

    The original modulation scheme associated with UWB works almost as Pulse Position Modulation (PPM): Within a certain, fixed time slot a very short pulse with high energy is emitted. The position of the pulse is decided by a in advance determined code scheme. Depending of the code scheme and the pulse position, the time slot is interpreted as containing either a 0 or a 1.

    The powerfull short pulses can be shown to have a very weak and very wide representation in the frequency domain. Without knowing the coding scheme in a link, a UWB signal is thus seen as noise.

    Walls and other obstacles tend to obstruct certain specific frequencies only. Since UWB signals have Ultra Wide Bandwith, UWB communication can theroretically go through all kinds of natural obstacles very easily.

    The hard part in UWB is making an antenna, that can actually emit signals with this very high bandwidth. Normal antennas are designed to emit in a narrow band. Thus, to make UWB work flawlessly, a lot of research must be made to make a good antenna.

    Disclaimer: EE student (only) in the field of Wireless Communication Networks.

    • Antenna (Score:3, Informative)

      by Detritus ( 11846 )
      The discone antenna is simple to construct and has very wide bandwidth.
      • Very wide bandwidth, but little gain. That probably shouldn't matter for short range.

        And for everything else, there's Pringles... :^P

        • The gain deppends on the frequency. Low gain for low frequencies and high gain for high frequencies. Also high bandwidth with BPSK modulation might work better than low bandwidth 256QAM modulation.
    • I think I speak for the majority of slashdotters who aren't EE majors when I say -- WTF?

      All and all it was a good attempt.
      • You have have seen discone antennas sold for scanner aficionados, who need a wide frequency range but usually not directionality.

        Imagine a cone, pointy side up, with a disc on top. Take one wire to the disk, the other to the cone.

        I'm having a devil of a time finding an explanation of the theory that won't collapse under a Slashdotting. One important point is that a frequency range of 3 to 1 or 10 to 1 is considered pretty good for a practical antenna, which might not be enough for a UWB signal.

        Fred KC7YR

  • Oh is that all?? (Score:5, Funny)

    by hydrino ( 131216 ) on Saturday April 12, 2003 @09:06AM (#5715874)
    I was all excited when I saw the MBPS. Now I'm only 1/8 as excited.
    This isn't Fox News guys.
    You all need to sit down in a room and go over the (b)bits and (B)Bytes thing....
    • Why 1/8? Try again. How about 1/10 or 1/12 or so? There ain't no stupid network in this world that sends you 8 bits per byte!!! 10 to 12 is a bit more realistic. 8 bits isn't even true inside a cpu unless it's cheap and dumb. Parity and ECC eat bits for lunch.
  • The article seems to suggest it could be out by 2004-05. Thats just about a year and a half to wait.
    The speed seems good enuff to replace cables evarywhere you use them. Cables are essentially used when we have short ranges and large data, exactly what this offers.Imagine wireless monitors, external storage and all sorts of reconfigurable computers (imagine a beouwulf cluster which can be reconfigured by just moving machines around and joining a group).

  • What's the speed of this? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by SysKoll ( 48967 ) on Saturday April 12, 2003 @09:46AM (#5715963)

    I see MBps (mega Byte per second) and Mbps (Mega bit per second). A byte is 8 bits. That's an order of magnitude of difference!

    The standardized way of writing this unit is Mbit/s or MByte/s. Don't invent your own, use the standard units.

  • Is there really a market for this kind of thing?

    Please, name an application where two devices are less than 1 meter apart, need very high-speed communications, and a $0.10 cable can't be used.
    • There's a huge market for this because since the UWB technique doesn't require carrier waves and lots of power it doesn't require all sorts of power amplification as traditional communication methods.

      So why is that cool? It means that UWB can be used as an inter IC communication method, thus eliminating the need of parallel buses!

      When the antennas are becoming better (higher gain), the UWB technique will expand to have a larger range, which will expand the market even further.
  • approved standard for a high-speed, short distance communications standard We now have a standard for a standard? When did that standard pass?
  • This is not a WiFi replacement, it's a cable replacement (like Firewire). UWB cannot be used at range, at least partly because it uses very very low power so as not to interfere with the large number of other devices using the variety of frequencies that it covers (which is a huge swathe).

    There is some mention by an Intel person that this might become a part of the Bluetooth standard though.

    simon
    • It's at very low power because the FCC said to put it at low power. The Pulse Position Modualtion (PPM)nature means it is not likely to interfier with other transmissions - it will look like regular background noise.

      So, to get bigger distances, TURN UP THE POWER! I'd be willing to bet it works ;). That's why its part of the IEEE 802.15 standard for Personal Area Networks (PAN).

      • It's at very low power because the FCC said to put it at low power.

        But your argument is circular ... the FCC said to put it at low power because it will interfere. It really doesn't matter if the signal looks like noise or something else, it will still interfere!

        (and since it's ultra-wideband, it will interfere will a lot of different signals)

        simon

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