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Wireless Networking IT

Historic IEEE 802 Group Looks Back and Forward 45

Posted by samzenpus
from the state-of-things dept.
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."
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Historic IEEE 802 Group Looks Back and Forward More

Historic IEEE 802 Group Looks Back and Forward

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  • MAN/LAN (Score:3, Interesting)

    by zlel (736107) on Thursday March 11 2010, @06:09AM (#31435904) Homepage
    This is really nostalgic I almost forgot what MAN meant!

  • Re:Ethernet was fine (Score:4, Interesting)

    by TheLink (130905) on Thursday March 11 2010, @06:14AM (#31435914) Journal
    In case people don't get it, with the current WiFi standards you cannot have an easy way for a Cafe/Hotel/Conference to provide encrypted wireless connections to guests in a way where they cannot snoop on each other's connections. if you use preshared key users can decrypt each other's traffic. If you use username and password, it's far more inconvenient for the user and the service provider.

  • So let me just get this straight (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Tomsk70 (984457) on Thursday March 11 2010, @06:35AM (#31435976)

    They 'standardised' the following -

    Ethernet (which you still have to set to 1000/Full because Auto-negotiate doesn't work properly)
    Wi-Fi (how many years has it taken for N to become standard? I've been through three pre-N routers....)
    Bluetooth (which is infamous for not working between devices by different manufacturers, to the point that no-one bothers with it. Oh and you get spammed).

    After decades of having to deal with this nonsense, yes - I'd have a few questions for them. Right after setting them on fire.

  • Maybe they can change IEEE's pro-swpat stance (Score:3, Interesting)

    by H4x0r Jim Duggan (757476) on Thursday March 11 2010, @07:20AM (#31436140) Homepage Journal

    In the Bilski case, IEEE filed a brief pushing *for* software patents [swpat.org]. Maybe specific groups in IEEE, like the 802 group, should push for a change in this position. Having the whole wifi industry paying a tax to CSIRO [swpat.org] for a wifi patent must make this group a little more clued in about the harm caused.

  • Get the configuration right (Score:4, Interesting)

    by thoughtspace (1444717) on Thursday March 11 2010, @08:27AM (#31436388)

    I am staggered how complicated it is to setup WiFi a lay-person. Far too much jargon (SSID, WPA, WPA2, WEP, TKIP, AES+TKIP, channels ...), and stupid ideas like multiple WEP keys. Let alone connecting via ethernet, change the subnet, browse to an IP address, etc etc etc just to get it going. What an awful decade of design.

    Look ... from day 1 we just wanted a secret password.

    Public networks are different and need to be publicly identified - don't shoe-horn it into the same user interface.

    Start thinking like a user and stop this engineers crap.

"I just want to be a good engineer." -- Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple Computer, concluding his keynote speech at the 1988 AppleFest