FireWire Gets Ready to Go Wireless 215
mindless4210 writes "The 1394 Trade Association has approved a specification for the development of wireless FireWire applications, which will let 1394-enabled devices, both wired and unwired, to connect with each other. The new spec will enable communication between a variety of devices, such as set-top boxes, HDTVs, tuners, and DVD players, all of which will be able to interoperate in home networks. Officials speculated that in the future there could be plug-in cards for set-top boxes enabling wireless connection to DVD players and hard-disk drives. The trade association also said it will work with the WiMedia Alliance to jointly develop collaborative products."
Because cell phones aren't bad enough (Score:1, Interesting)
I wonder if this period will be remembered as the biggest soft tissue experiment in human history. Heck, I don't even sit next to people using cell phones or near micowave ovens.
Build it and they will come... (Score:5, Interesting)
The 802.11 (x) standard has achieved pretty much dominance over the wireless infrastructure.
It seems to me that this may be just another competing standard that will introduce incompatibilities and vendor lockin down the track. How is this magically different to bluetooth, wap, etc????
Kewl....all the early adopters can run off and buy this kit....I'll try and find a cost-effective consumer solution that is secure.
Wireless (fill in the blank) (Score:4, Interesting)
Range? (Score:5, Interesting)
Having everything on your desk talk via wireless Firewire seems feasible. But is it possible to have an entire house run at 400 Mbps, walls, RF sources, and all?
Seems like this might be an 802.11g type deal with 54MB on paper and a much lower real life value.
Re:A future without cables and wires (Score:5, Interesting)
I can't imagine (!!) how much harder it would be to setup your stereo with no wires.. i.e. does the video from the cablemodem go to the TiVO, VCR, Stereo, or TV first? The tv audio wants to automatically be grabbed by the stereo input, but dammit I want the TiVO to go to the stereo and the TV to go to the TiVO! It could be insane.. will we have to tweak 10 different bios interfaces to get this all connected right? Do I have to push buttons on the corresponding devices (like the wireless mouse) every time the house power surges?
I don't think this will solve the worlds problems, or even the ones you propose it will solve.
Re:Yes but can it charge my ipod? (Score:5, Interesting)
Firewire versus USB (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:*drooool* (Score:3, Interesting)
have you ever noticed what tastes good is going to give you cancer???
Re:A future without cables and wires (Score:2, Interesting)
the range would need to be very short like 3 feet (does the proximity really need to be that far away?) so that your neighbors' Cable signal does not leak into yours, other than that, I see perhaps devices that are servers (Cable boxes, sat boxes, Stereo receivers, CD players, DVD players, DV camcorders, computers) and devices that are clients (Speakers, TVs, computers)
this would alleviate any cross talk issues and if you are really paranoid, you can add in a ID lock so that a device can not accidentally try to connect to your computer when you want it to connect to your TV, etc.
Wardriving Burglars? (Score:2, Interesting)
Hey, lemme dream a bit here! (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, the power thing is a bitch. You're absolutely right about the inherent difficulties. But I can't think about something that actually happened to me in my youth. I was about 7 or 8 years old, and I was haing a conversation with my mother.
"Man, I wish you could just play whatever movie you wanted to on your TV." (This was the mid-1970s, mind you) I continued, trying to be practical. "But it'll never happen."
Mom looked over at me and said, "Do you think the settlers crossing the midwest in their covered wagons could have even imagined television? Sometimes things that seem impossible turn out not to be so impossible after all."
Of course now I can pop a DVD of practically any movie I want and watch it at my leisure. I don't claim to have the answers to making the world wireless, but I have learned not to rule things out.
Re:A future without cables and wires (Score:3, Interesting)
Instead of devices having wall warts and PC PSU's, you could just tap the stable 12v and GND lines and use a smaller chip that could convert it to 5v or whatever.
Is something like this feasable (with a proper distribution assembly (ie not just a parallel DC signal)?
*shudder* (Score:2, Interesting)
Fantastic marketing move, folks (Score:3, Interesting)
When this comes out, they're going to have a real dillywhacker to deal with. Cause I'm sure no consumer *anywhere* will be confused by Wi-Fi Fi-Wi.
Spectrum crowding much? (Score:4, Interesting)
I want some music. I fire up iTunes for Linux, power on my FireWireless-enabled iPod, and start blasting a ripped Metallica MP3.
Since my Tablet PC's tinny speakers are not enough to satisfy my audiophile ears, I pipe the output via wireless USB to a box hooked up to my stereo receiver.
I get the urge to head bang, and put my Tablet PC on the coffee table, picking up a Bluetooth keyboard so I can still type scathingly witty replies to the Slashdot articles I'm browsing.
Now then, what's wrong with this picture?
Answer: SPECTRUM! All of the protocols I mentioned above are shoehorned into the same narrow slice of unlicensed 2.4 GHz spectrum! The same wavelengths are also alive with traffic from a constellation of consumer electronics: cordless phones, A/V senders, RF remotes, proprietary-protocol wireless keyboards and mice, and numerous other devices.
Even if some upcoming technologies (WUSB, Wireless 1394) end up in the 5GHz band, spectrum crowding will still be an issue. For any individual device (iPod, stereo receiver, mouse/kb) it may not be much of an issue, because the extremely short range of the signal makes it less likely for devices to interfere. But what about your PC, which is supposed to act as the hub that terminates all of these wireless links to its peripherals? The poor thing is going to be bathed in a constant stream of 2.4GHz radio energy! With so many devices shouting at it, how will my PC be able to listen to any one of them?
IANARE (I Am Not A Radio Engineer), but it seems to me that spectrum crowding will become a major problem in a few years. Does someone care to explain to me how ultra-wideband spread-spectrum technology is going to break the Shannon limit, and pull more bandwidth out of thin air than is inherently present?
USB did this too (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Can't they all just get along? (Score:4, Interesting)
The answer is partly in their recommendations, including:
- don't use long cables (ie even well within the "spec")
- don't put many hosts on a single cable; use a bridge (adds cost)
Also, the report DOES document a decline in ethernet's total througput as more stations compete for media access.
Token ring doesn't. It supports over 99% total throughput no matter how that traffic is comprised - time-critical plus data transfer between many nodes.
In my limited experience:
For 40 stations, scattered among various offices / rooms, all active, thin ethernet wouldn't go over 35% util without a lot of collisions -> retries. So many retries, that most of the traffic WAS the retries. There weren't just collisions, there were double and triple collisions (easy to detect with the right equipment).
On the other hand, I've seen a single token-ring run full capacity with more than 40 active stations, and no-one would even notice if someone else was copying huge files over the network. No such thing as a collision.
Ok, at those speeds it was only a few sites, but it's just not worth trying to push ethernet to its cable lngth plus (# of nodes or repeaters) limits.
Thankfully, cheap switched networks have saved us that pain. Except for wireless performance being about the same
Collisions are Good (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Because cell phones aren't bad enough (Score:4, Interesting)
I agree but for the fact that we've been poisoning ourselves for centuries with various substances that were thought harmless at the time.
Everybody knows about lead poisoining now but at one time it was in wide use. It was even used to "plumb" cheap wines to make them sweeter, to which some historians attribute Beethoven's chronic stomach pains, deafness, and eventual early demise.
Many toxic substances have a similar past. Mercury was used to treat Syphilis. Toxic copper-arsenic salts were used to produce cheap green paint in the Victorian era. Chromated copper arsenate (CCA) is still being used today as a wood preservative although it's being phased out in mainstream applications due to its toxic effects.
I guess I'm just saying that if studies started to show harmful effects from microwaves and cellphones, I'd be less surprised than Beethoven if you warped back and told him his lead-laced wine was killing him.