Historic IEEE 802 Group Looks Back and Forward

An anonymous reader writes "The IEEE MAN/LAN Standards Committee — better known as the people who brought us Ethernet, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth — is celebrating its 30th anniversary next week. This article has interviews with the original committee chairman and other veteran members, and reveals some of the inside situation. It also looks at some of the upcoming 802.x standards including one that sends data by modulating visible light."

Also coming up this year...

[dtmos]

... is the 20th Anniversary of the 802.11 Working Group itself. The Working Group held its first meeting September 10-14, 1990 [ieee802.org], in Oshawa, Ontario, Canada.

Re:Ethernet was fine

[TheRaven64]

In case people don't get it, with the current wired Ethernet standards, you cannot have an easy way for a Cafe/Hotel/Conference to provide encrypted wired connections to guests in a way where they cannot snoop on each other's connections either. If you want security, you should be using end-to-end encryption.

Re:So let me just get this straight

[Tomsk70]

Man, how ungratefull can you get. Why dont you go out and develop you own "standard" wireless protocol and see how long it takes you!

Err...no, that's what they were supposed to be doing. Or do you think an eight-year lead time is acceptable? And your answer is stupid anyway - you don't say 'well write your own OS' when someone complains about Windows.

The only hardware I've ever had an auto-negotiate issue with is Cisco switches, on many occasions with completely different clients over many years. Everyone else seems to play nice, but Cisco was well known for implementing their own "standard" early.

Which tells me exactly how much networking hardware you've actually worked with, so let me fill you in - ISCSI not working? Set all adaptors to 1000/Full. Backup Exec not working? Set all adaptors to 1000/Full. Network generally slow? Set all adaptors to 1000/Full. I could list around 20 more off the top of my head...and then there's stuff such as - Vista network auto-tuning buggering up your system? That's because there's *no standard*.

So yes, after wasting my time for *years* with non-compatible Wireless, Bluetooth and Ethernet 'standards', I think I've earnt the right to be ungrateful, thank you very much :-)