60GHz Uber-WiFi Proposed By New WiGig Group

judgecorp writes "A new vendor group has promised a Gigabit wireless specification by the end of this year. The Wireless Gigabit (WiGig) spec is apparently 80 percent done and, since it is aimed at high-definition TV, it has to go at more than 3Gbps. There's around 7GHz of spectrum freely available in the 60GHz band, so it's technically feasible, and with all the major Wi-Fi silicon vendors on board (as well as Microsoft, Dell, Nokia and others) WiGig looks to have the political muscle too. They should be aware of the Sibeam-led WirelessHD group, though, already in the 60GHz space, and Ultrawideband (UWB) is not dead, as there are actual, real UWB products."

Re:Scary energy levels?

[644bd346996]

What are you worried about? It's not like we're talking about ionizing radiation, since 60Ghz is well below even visible wavelengths. And for LAN use, the necessary wattage will be far below the levels needed to cook somebody. (Consider that the Active Denial System [wikipedia.org] at 95Ghz requires megawatts just to make you feel hot, and it concentrates it's energy in one direction, unlike a wlan.)

Generating dangerous amounts of omnidirectional microwave radiation requires the use of components that couldn't fit inside a laptop, let alone be powered by one.

Good luck with that

[bzzfzz]

Great if you don't want to go more than a few feet. The problems with walls, floors, and roofs, bad enough for WiFi at 2.4Ghz, are far more serious in the higher bands. Practical in-home, wireless HDTV video distribution will remain elusive for years. It's not just a matter of bandwidth. The performance of the network has to be consistent regardless of whether someone opens a door or stands in the hallway or you drop frames. And it has to be able to actually achieve HDTV rates consistently in most homes or buyers will get frustrated from bringing home stuff that doesn't work for them.

Re:60GHz is available because its almost useless

[Anonymous Coward]

I think he means a wire...

Sure you can

[LanMan04]

Sure you can. A good quality (not insane quality, but good) movie at 720p is typically encoded to fill a DVD5 (4.37GB)

4.37GB = 4474.88MB = 35799.04Mb

So we need to stuff 35799 megabits down a pipe in 2 hours or so.

2 hours = 120 minutes = 7200 seconds

35799/7200 = 4.97208 Mb/sec

So you need a sustained transfer rate of about 5 megabits per second to stream a 4.37GB movie in 2 hours.

Re:60GHz is available because its almost useless

[drmofe]

"Competence" = "practised by a certified engineer". We did extensive testing before lighting the link up. We even threw a faulty unit back at Bridgewave due to a fault in a $1.70 part (in a $40K unit) that our testing picked up. (Hey, we still managed to line it up when the voltmeter was reading 0.3V instead of 3.3V) The point is that you probably had a duff unit, but also that engineering is more than just point and click - it also involves selecting, testing and verifying that your equipment is doing sane things. It doesn't imply that 60GHz is somehow unusable as a data transmission frequency. Quite the contrary, as others have pointed out.

Re:60GHz is available because its almost useless

[adolf]

Uh-huh. Thanks, Captain Obvious.

Wake me up after you've either failed similarly, or found something that I've done incompetently. K?

Your inane suffrage from the typical alpha-geek doctrine which prescribes that the first thing to do when told of the failure of others is best countered with the assertion that operator is at least incompetent is, at best, a positively useless behavioral pattern.

You didn't get the whole story, anyway - I was pissing and moaning on Slashdot, not trying to write a fucking novel.

Here's the sequence of events:

1. Customer hires Company A to install several Gigalink spans. Company A is certified to do so. Links all work at gigabit speeds with low latency and no significant packet loss. Everything works fine for several months.
2. It gets cold out.
3. 2 of 3 links stop working most of the time, especially at night, unless it's warm out.
4. Company A turns out to be clueless and unhelpful, despite their paper "competence."
5. Customer asks Company B, who they've used for radio work for tens of years, including other WWAN projects, if they can help.
6. Company B (that's us, by the way) says "Sure, we'll give it a shot. No promises."
7. Try. Realigning appears to succeed.
8. Fail. Cold out again.
9. Try again when it is cold out, like -5F. Replace non-penetrating roof mount on bouncy snow-covered roof at one end of link with 3" sch. 80 pipe securely fastened to solid brick wall of elevator house on roof. Appear to succeed.
10. Fail. After a couple of heat cycles, things don't work anymore. Just like before.
11. Try. Let's line this thing up right, once and for all. Inspect radio's hardware for signs that thermal expansion might be somehow altering the alignment in a meaningful way, and grasp at all other available straws. Inspect other buildings for possible interference sources. Concoct and shoot down different scenarios including ice formation from flue gas condensation to power issues when furnace is running extensively. Find nothing.
12. Fail.
13. Customer calls manufacturer. Manufacturer suggests Company C to align things better.
14. Company C tries. Spends all day. Moves the pipe mount up as high as possible on wall. Manages insignificantly improved peak numbers vs. what we were getting.
15. Company C goes back to Chicago.
16. Company C fails. As soon as it gets cold out, link stops working.
17. Customer calls manufacturer. Manufacturer says "OK, send a pair of them to us and we'll test it here."
18. We install a temporary 5.8GHz link (at substantially lower speed) for Customer to use in the interim.
19. Customer sends a pair of Gigalink units back to Manufacturer.
20. Manufacturer calls customer. Says units work fine in their lab without any particular difficulty and are performing to specification.
21. ??? (nothing's budged since then, 5.8GHz link is still working fine, remaining 2 installed Gigalink spans also working fine now that the weather is nice and warm)
22. I conclude that 60GHz-ish stuff doesn't fucking work. It may be counter to a world of differing opinion, but this one is mine.

So, Oh Wise and Competent One, please tell me where I've gone wrong, other than the fact that I accepted the job to begin with. I beg this of you. Show me the error of my ways, oh great and powerful -- oops, I meant "competent" -- Oz!

Thanks! (And I promise not to look behind the curtain.)

Re:Proper frequency for the purpose

[RazzleDazzle]

So maybe not full gigabit but there are wireless products that support higher bandwidth links at higher than 802.11 frequencies. For example check out Dragon Wave [dragonwaveinc.com] products. With directional antennas and line of sight you can go for miles and get decent bandwidth.