802.11ad Will Knock Your Socks Off, Says Interop Panel 174
alphadogg writes "While the Wi-Fi world is rightly abuzz over the rapidly approaching large-scale deployment of the new 802.11ac standard, experts at an Interop NY panel said this week that the 802.11ad standard is likely to be even more transformative. '802.11ac is an extension for pure mainstream Wi-Fi,' said Sean Coffey, Realtek's director of standards and business development. 'It's evolutionary. ... You're not going to see dramatically new use cases." By contrast, 802.11ad adds 60GHz connectivity to the previously used 2.4GHz and 5GHz frequencies, potentially providing multi-gigabit connection speeds and dramatically broadening the number of applications for which wireless can be used."
So what? (Score:5, Funny)
And the signal range will be abysmal.
Re:So what? (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, apparently replacing wires is the general idea of the 802.11ad:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-57326718-264/wilocity-60ghz-wireless-revolution-begins-at-ces/ [cnet.com]
Or wireless point to point line of sight commercial connections:
http://www.bridgewave.com/products/60ghz.cfm [bridgewave.com]
Re: (Score:3)
Stuff like WPA2 PSK is crackable, going to the "Enterprise" version of WPA2 requires RADIUS, usernames and passwords[1].
[1] In theory you could have a standard "anonymous" username and password for public "secure" WiFi networks but I don't see as standard for it.
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Only if you use pre-shared keys. If you don't and your password is not a standard dictionary word AND the wireless access point doesn't allow connections from an unknown mac (sure you could spoof a known one... that is also still communicating with the WAP. Won't end well), there is no practical way for your wireless access point to be hacked. At least not yet.
Yes - but the upside... (Score:4, Insightful)
mesh networks (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:So what? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:So what? (Score:4, Insightful)
That's actually the point (Score:4, Informative)
Depending on your situation, the signal range of WLAN can often be far to great. If you get WLAN to work only within a single room, you can have a new "cell" in every room. Which means you can have way more cells and serve more people at a higher bandwidth.
When you actually need more range, you can always use directional antennas. Of course 60 GHz is attenuated quite a bit by air, so it's certainly unsuitable for outside microwave links.
Re:That's actually the point (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know why the consumer market would be excited for it, though. The main use of WiFi is networking of devices in separate room/floors of a house without having to go to the expense of running actual Cat5 all around. According to Wikipedia these waves would be line-of-sight only. And if everything's in the same room unless it's a portable device my feeling is I might as well just use ethernet and get a more reliable, lower latency connection instead.
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Well for the consumer market wired Ethernet certainly is an alternative. However think of conferences. Putting an access point up high near the ceiling in every room will get you decent coverage.
Re:That's actually the point (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm guessing the main bit would be this:
This opens up quite a bit in terms of devices doing things like screen sharing. Say you've got a laptop or a tablet PC and you want to share the picture to your TV - you can do that today (without cables) using your wireless, but it's fairly bandwidth heavy - you won't be able to do a lot of it without affecting your network's throughput. Contrast to this, where 60Ghz offers a lot of bandwidth that's localised, you can share UHD streams to your TV without even touching the wider range of 2.4Ghz or 5Ghz. Hell, you could probably clone a HDD to a network share wirelessly and quickly without ever affecting the other devices and even if you really are hammering the 60Ghz, someone in the next room doing the same will be largely unaffected as the range isn't that far.
Of course, I'm assuming the 60Ghz will be point-to-point as opposed to the Star pattern that the average wifi network uses.
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Well, if you can put a couple of access points around the house with roaming it wouldn't be to bad.
Obvious problem then is price.
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Forget I even mentioned it, this new frequency probably sucks are penetrating walls.
Re:So what? (Score:4, Interesting)
And the signal range will be abysmal.
So what. If the range is 2-5 meters and bandwidth is in Gbps, it has a potential to remove the cable clutter from my desk, allows me to connect my laptop to my TV just by sitting in front of it and I don't have to worry too much that my neighbours will do man-in-the-middle.
Re:So what? (Score:5, Informative)
60GHz will be essentially unaffected by microwaves.
However, I note that my laptop (with 802.11g) works just fine on top of my operating microwave.
Re:So what? (Score:4, Insightful)
60GHz will be essentially unaffected by microwaves.
However, I note that my laptop (with 802.11g) works just fine on top of my operating microwave
I hope for your sake that isn't all sitting on your lap while operating. You might end up like this guy [mtvnimages.com] if you keep doing that for too long.
Re:So what? (Score:5, Informative)
60GHz will be essentially unaffected by microwaves.
However, I note that my laptop (with 802.11g) works just fine on top of my operating microwave
I hope for your sake that isn't all sitting on your lap while operating. You might end up like this guy [mtvnimages.com] if you keep doing that for too long.
Link contains image of a South Park character with elephantitis of the testicles, wheeling his scrotum around in a wheelbarrow.
Obviously NSFW.
Re:So what? (Score:5, Funny)
I thought they were giant potatoes.
Hairy potatoes ? (Score:4, Funny)
I thought they were giant potatoes.
I dunno about you, but I have yet to see any potato with hair
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Yes... if potatoes were wrinkled and had hair....
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If that image is NSFW then our social norms are now totally fscked up..
Wow this world puzzles me...
Re:So what? (Score:4, Interesting)
60GHz will be essentially unaffected by microwaves.
However, I note that my laptop (with 802.11g) works just fine on top of my operating microwave
I hope for your sake that isn't all sitting on your lap while operating. You might end up like this guy if you keep doing that for too long.
Link contains image of a South Park character with elephantitis of the testicles, wheeling his scrotum around in a wheelbarrow.
Obviously NSFW.
What else would I post in response to someone who might have a microwave and a laptop computer sitting on top of their lap? I don't know why anyone would be surprised that the image would be NSFW.
... giant cantaloupes? If you weren't looking closely - or familiar with that episode of South park - you might not know what it is.
That said, at first glance it could just be some guy pushing a wheelbarrow of
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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Yeah... Just try putting it in the microwave and see how well it works! (I recommend "High" for 3 minutes... or if you want extended fireworks try the "Defrost" setting)
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And probably be interfered with by other devices, including appliances like microwaves.
Only if you use the device inside the microwave. While the microwave is running.
While the frequency range labelled microwave goes from something like 1Ghz to 200Ghz (a bit wider than that I think), microwave ovens use frequencies around 2.4Ghz and so shouldn't interfere much with anything at 60GHz.
Are we suddenly following the alphabet? (Score:5, Funny)
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To the tune of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star...
eight oh two eleven (sigh) will you 'b' or 'c' or 'g'?
Up above the router high, incompatible handshake wifi.
Then my bandwidth sucked so dry, a bigger amplifier oh and my.
eight oh two eleven (sigh) will you 'n' or 'a' 'c', god why?
Hundred dollars that's too high, to maintain compatible wifi
when my neighbor goes to buy, the next great thing to make it die
Twinkle twinkle, my wifi, how I wonder why I try...
Re:Are we suddenly following the alphabet? (Score:4, Funny)
I'm sure there's not going to be a massive amount of confusion between 802.11a and 802.11ac or 802.11ad. People are far too tech-savvy these days!
Re:Are we suddenly following the alphabet? (Score:5, Funny)
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IEEE 802 (Score:5, Insightful)
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So you're saying 802.11 is not the WLAN group, or did you mean 802.11 is the 100BaseVG?
The only thing I noticed wrong with the post was it was a serious response to a joke, but swapping 11 and 12 in it doesn't fix any errors. Then again, I'm a bit impaired by painkillers right now so maybe I'm missing something which would otherwise be obvious.
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IEEE-802.11 specifies the WLAN physical protocols. Feel better soon.
Lord. (Score:2)
So... should I keep waiting? I haven't gone up to "N" yet, even. Now we have ac coming, and ad on the board. Yeesh.
Re:Lord. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Lord. (Score:5, Funny)
DC. Everyone knows AC is for killing animals on stage and generating that relaxing hum in audio devices. DC is the way of the future.
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You can turn the AC off now, and just open a window
assuming you're in the northern hemisphere
Here it is 34F outside right now.
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DC
Marvel
Re:Lord. (Score:5, Informative)
If the speeds of G are good enough for you, don't bother upgrading. N gets high-speed from a lot of tricks that aren't very nice, like double-sized channels, multiple radios (which cheap receivers skimp on), etc. This was supposed to be okay because people were supposed to only enable double-wide channels on the 5Ghz band, but some devices only support the lower frequencies to begin with, and they certainly don't stop you from stomping on those 2.4ghz channels, trying to get extra speed you probably won't see, anyhow...
Even many devices sold today are G-only, from my cell phone, to my wireless PTZ surveilance cameras, etc, etc.
Re:Lord. (Score:5, Insightful)
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The problem is that the range is too good I'm currently getting interference with from a dorm full of wifi routers and devices a half mile away....
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For a dorm room, a 60GHz router should be just great, since you don't have to worry much about range. But when you have a house, or worse, you're in an office building, range becomes much more important, plus the ability to penetrate many walls. No one wants an access point in every room of their house.
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exactly this. what is the point of having a small narrow hot spot of very fast speed? are people really too lazy to plug in a cable when they need to transfer tons and tons of data quickly? what use case is there for cutting the wire but forcing the wifi device to be in the same small area?
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The problem with wireless is that the range sucks. 802.11n has a maximum speed of 600 mbps but I've never been able to get anywhere close to that. The speed is respectable if I'm standing right next to the router, but if I'm 2 floors away (router in bottom floor of 3 storey no basement house) then the speed is just atrocious. 60 GHz won't travel that far anyway. The only thing that's good for is when you're right next to the router, which means you might as well have a wired connection.
Perhaps you should add more APs or move to a more wi-fi friendly house? I live in a one level open plan house and get good coverage from anywhere on my regular sized property. I would never expect wi-fi to work through solid walls let alone floors. Perhaps you're expecting too much?
Location! (Score:2)
OP needs to move his router to the middle of his house, at a high spot on the 2nd floor, maybe 3rd. When I had a 2 story house I put my g router at the top center of the 2nd floor, and not only got great reception all around the house, I got it all around the block.
Leaving your router on the floor under your desk is a great way to get lousy performance!
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60GHz might travel farther than you think.
an antenna at 60GHz is about 2.5mm, and that's for a basic dipole....
you can easily put multiple antennas on a device, which means you can use beam-forming and get some very tasty antenna gain, maybe on the order of 12 to 15dB.
there are a whole lot of if's attached to that since it depends on a very solid baseband implementation, but theoretically the use of phase array antennas/beam-forming could negate the much higher path loss.
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not quite right. N and AC and eventually AD use MIMO which is physically separate transmitters and receivers, i.e. multiple channels.
MIMO doesn't quite get N x (transmitters/receivers) of performance, but it comes pretty close.
AC simply provides for even wider channels than N, i.e. 80 and even 160 MHz channels, but still uses MIMO. It also has a crap load of protocol stuff in it too.
_theoretically_ having multiple receivers would give you a distinct improvement in performance through receiver diversity, b
Means exactly dick. (Score:4, Interesting)
Look, the problem isn't available bandwidth, it's the fact that it's unlicensed bandwidth. Which means part 15 of the FCC rules; "device must accept any harmful interference..." Sure, right now there's only one set of devices and one standard for that frequency range, but give it time. A bug or problem will be discovered. A new protocol will need to be released. Someone will discover some new way of squeezing out just a few more drops of speed -- and it'll be incompatible. And because it's all running on the same frequency, there will be contention. Eventually, the entire situation de-evolves into the same thing that happened with CB radios: You got truckers with kilowatt-rated amplifiers and no equipment certification; There's bleed over from one channel to the next, tons of static, and people running such ridiculously overpowered and marginally functional equipment that it makes sticking your head in a microwave look downright safe compared to sitting next to some of those rigs.
It happened with 802.11b, when we switched to g. Then n was released, and it oblitherated b and g. Then manufacturers released the "turbo" modes, which ate up even more bandwidth. And nevermind all the wireless keyboards, mice, phones, wireless gamer headsets, and home audio systems, all ALSO operating on the same frequencies, each using different encoding schemes. Pretty soon you've got hackers wiring up coax and tin cans, slapping on several watt amplifiers, raising the black flag and saying "Fuck da police!" and blasting a microwave beam 50 miles, and self-sterilizing their manhood from the near field RF...
Face it guys: We need regulated airspace. We need black vans. We need licensing, and a watchdog group so if someone doesn't play nice -- it's knock, knock, and goodbye offending equipment (and possibly neighbor). And we need to mandate sunsetting of equipment periodically to maintain inter-device compatibility and spectrum integrity.
The "wild wild west" wifi is a disaster in dense urban areas. You're lucky if you can get 20 feet from the router before the signal goes to hell in some places.
Re:Means exactly dick. (Score:4, Insightful)
> You're lucky if you can get 20 feet from the router before the signal goes to hell in some places.
Ohai. I'm a San-Franciscan. I live in an apartment building in North Tenderloin, and can see ~15->30 802.11g APs, most of which are screaming on channel 6. I have a bog-standard 802.11g router sitting in my window, which serves my apartment very well, and can reach the bus stop, and the nearby coffee shop ~150 feet away.
> It happened with 802.11b, when we switched to g. Then n was released, and it oblitherated b and g.
What? b, g, and n all co-exist. I say this as an operator of an abgn AP that has devices from all of those flavors of 802.11 connected simultaneously.
> Eventually, the entire situation de-evolves into the same thing that happened with CB radios...
I grew up with a CB radio in our family vehicles, and had one in the van that I drove as a teenager. The situation you describe is neither the one that exists today, nor is it the one has existed for the past fifty years.
> Face it guys: We need regulated airspace. We need black vans. We need licensing...
There are many ISPs that use unlicensed microwave spectrum for long-to-medium wireless backhaul links. These guys are doing very well, and don't run into the doomsday situation that you've described. For short-haul wireless, unlicensed 802.11 works fine. But, don't be a cheapass, buy 5Ghz gear! You get better range, and 802.11n has more space to do the frequency multiplexing stuff that makes it reach 100->200mbps.
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A good bit of trouble could have been avoided if 802.11n had been made 5GHz only. The 2.4GHz spectrum was simply too crowded already and never offered enough non-interfering channels anyway. In a dense environment the limited propagation distance of 5GHz is a GOOD THING. From my apartment I can "see" 27 APs in the 2.4GHz band, many of them running the 40MHz mode which effectively occupies the entirety of the spectrum. I can see three 5GHz APs, one of which is mine.
The problem we face now is that because
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The 2.4 GHz works just fine though....
Then again... I seem to recall reading that the iPad 3 had a super shitty wireless implementation... either the antenna, or the radio... not sure. But that definitely sounds right, considering my issues/
That and (Score:3)
The higher your frequency, the worse your range/penetration. You can see the difference even with 2.4GHz vs 5GHz. In my place, I can get full signal bars in my bedroom with 2.4GHz, but only 2 or so with 5GHz, from the same router. For a more extreme example look at the Navy's Seafarer system, which operated at 78Hz, and literally penetrated the entire earth, and compare it to visible light, which is 100s of THz, and is stopped by any solid substance.
60GHz does not have very good penetration.
Re:That and (Score:5, Informative)
compare it to visible light, which is 100s of THz, and is stopped by any solid substance.
In general good points, but my glasses beg to differ on this last one.
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Most spectrum is exactly that. Want to use some? Call your friendly local AT&T, Verizon, or Sprint.
Re:Means exactly dick. (Score:4, Insightful)
Most spectrum is exactly that. Want to use some? Call your friendly local AT&T, Verizon, or Sprint.
So is ham radio, and a section of bandwidth used for emergency services that uses the same standards as wifi, even the same equipment, just moved the frequencies. Guess what: They all work fine, at higher power levels, because there's a central authority to regulate it.
Regulation doesn't mean private control; It means there are rules, and punishments if you violate those rules. You can regulate access to a public resource. It's done every day.
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You will love these charts!
--> US Cellular Frequency chart --> http://www.qrctech.com/assets/Frequency-Chart/19Nov201024x36FreqChart.pdf [qrctech.com]
--> US Radio Wave Frequency Allocation Chart --> http://www.ntia.doc.gov/files/ntia/publications/2003-allochrt.pdf [doc.gov]
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60GHz signals don't exactly work like that. At part 15 output limits, this stuff has a hard time penetrating anything, let alone neighboring homes. In practice, it acts much more like light than the more conventional RF spectrums that we're all familiar with.
Please allow me to speculate that the only way to make such a system work (at all) without careful physical antenna alignment and an unobstructed line of sight will be sophis
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60GHz signals don't exactly work like that. At part 15 output limits, this stuff has a hard time penetrating anything, let alone neighboring homes. In practice, it acts much more like light than the more conventional RF spectrums that we're all familiar with.
I can confirm this with personal experience. I have a 60GHz wireless hdmi [engadget.com] set-up in my insanely large living room (it would have cost more for a decent quality cable run). I can make the picture "de-rez" simply by standing in front of the transmitter. I doubt that any useful signal escapes the room.
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So... You're saying we should do nothing and the problem will sort itself out nautrally. Cool.
Well, if you consider your neighbor irradiating your manhood to be "sorting", then yes.
Name one! (Score:2)
Name one application that needs multi-gigabit connection speeds on the client? Name one purely theoretical application that needs that kind of bandwidth? (Don't just propose insanely high res video, that's easy.)
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if latency is low: remote high definition desktop would be one of them.
many applications are hindered by bandwidth, stuff are computed on the server side because the data are too big to be transfered to the client.
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A wireless replacement for HDMI cables. The alternative would be to compress the video signal and transmit it as say a 50Mb/s signal, but that would add latency and reduce image quality.
I can also imagine using it for data transmission in science and industry in situations where the radio interference and the requirement of line of sight isn't a problem. Suppose that you have a camera (or some other sensor) that monitors a delicate process in a place where you don't want to run cables for whatever reason.
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Star trek's transporters would need a lot of bandwidth....
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WIreless NAS.
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Name one application that needs multi-gigabit connection speeds on the client? Name one purely theoretical application that needs that kind of bandwidth? (Don't just propose insanely high res video, that's easy.)
This is a very shortsighted statement. There are no applications that need multi-gigabit connection speeds because there are no multi-gigabit connections. Name a single computer program that requires more than a gigabyte of ram... (pretend it's 1989 and most computers have 2MB at most)
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Seismic data processing. Finite element analysis. Why not just throw in the entire feild of numerical computing? There are a lot of people that would have used a gigabyte of RAM in 1989 if they could have got it. People were effectively doing that back then with disk or tape as the scratch memory.
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It's really amazing that he could be so short sighted on a day when the example of the SKA project is also on the Slashdot front page. Shame on you HornWumpus!
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There are plenty of reason why fast transfers are useful. Copying files is one example. It's often a matter of faster is better, because you are often stuck waiting for it to complete (for example if I've ripped some CDs and want them on the laptop before leaving, or if I'm downloading some multi-GB data files to work remotely before I leave work). GbE is usually fast enough to max out the CPU or hard drive, but no wireless technology exists that is not a bottleneck.
For a home network, the 802.11ad will be
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Open SSI cluster?
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Name one application that needs a 12 GHz CPU.
For future reference in making idiotic comments, your argument automatically fails when you say "don't answer this with a valid answer, because that's too easy".
People have not even switched to N yet (Score:2)
Mostly because for most use cases it is identical, or close enough.
So, meh.
Physics (Score:2)
How is 60GHz going to reach any relevant distance at all without frying my brain at the same time?
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It's relevant for eliminating cords within a room, for presentations and such. Wires are for things that don't move. More and more stuff moves around these days. Even if you just plan to rearrange stuff in a room frequently it's nice to not have it wired. Don't say but it already has a power cord, either, unless you always wrap your data cables around your power cords.
Only in America and Japan (Score:2)
Versioning (Score:2)
This has to be some of the worst versioning ever - it's been decades(?) and we're still on sub-letters of 802.11 . When does it go to 802.12 (or heaven forbid, 803?)
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WiFi is a "last-inch" technology, not a "last-mile" technology. The high speeds you can get from consumer gear assume that there's little to no contention for the radio spectrum involved; if you're feeding an entire city block off a single access point, you've got several dozen people contending for t
Re:Why arent ISPs using WiFi for last-mile? (Score:4, Insightful)
If an entire city block was streaming video at the same time, you'd have HUGE problems, anyhow, because that cable and DSL service is shared, and heavily over-subscribed.
Besides, 5mbit is fast than what I'm getting at best right now. Wifi driving the price down allowing them to invest in more performance could only help.
And you're setting up a straw man, implying you have no choice between a single wifi channel per block, and an AP at every home.
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Actually that heavily depends on your ISP, while cable always is shared, DSL is not. Considering that most of the costs of DSL are at the last mile, good ISPs design their network so there will be no congestions in the typical peak hour of the day. And that is a moving target, a good ISP will upgrade their networks once it turns out more and more people are using streaming video.
Of course there are also ISPs run by people who want to squeeze every last penny out of the business.
Re:Why arent ISPs using WiFi for last-mile? (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually that heavily depends on your ISP, while cable always is shared, DSL is not
I can't help think that this phrase was something repeated by ADSL providers. With cable, the last-mile connection is a bus, whereas it's a point-to-point link with ADSL, but in terms of consumer experience this has absolutely no impact. You aren't sharing a single 10Mb/s last-mile connection when you buy a 10Mb/s cable connection. With DOCSIS 3, you've got about 40-50Mb/s per channel (less for the US version than the European version due to 6MH` vs 8MHz channels), and you've got at least 4 channels, and likely quite a lot more. Your cable modem restricts you to using some smaller amount, but the total amount of last-mile bandwidth is often more than the number of subscribers per segment multiplied by their advertised speed.
Beyond the last hop, however, the situation is identical between ADSL and cable. A number of ADSL customers or a number of cable segments (each containing multiple customers) will be connected to the same link. The ratio between the amount of bandwidth available on the upstream link and the maximum amount of bandwidth that it's possible for all of the downstream users to try to use is somewhere between 1:10 and 1:50, depending on your ISP. 1:20 is usually a reasonable number, because different peak usage times mean that this level of service typically lets everyone saturate their link when they want to.
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I'm sorry, but the DSLAM is typically connected via fibre. Unless your ISP is a cheapskate they are going to put in the minimal cost it takes up upgrade it so the peak utilisation (and that's what's relevant here) stays below 50%. Peak utilisation obviously rises with time, so the ISP needs to continuously upgrade their network. That's what I pay it for.
Bandwidth doesn't cost much when it comes via fibre. The difference between a Gigabit or 10 Gigabits is just a different module in your router. You can upgr
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That's quite true, and DSL providers got successfully sued for their misleading TV commercials about the subject (circa 2002 IIRC).
But to be fair, you do miss one point... DSL appeared on the scene BEFORE DOCSIS, so many of the people who had cable modems before 2002 or so,
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if you're feeding an entire city block off a single access point, you've got several dozen people contending for that same chunk of bandwidth
Not to mention coverage issues, try asking someone who's installed wireless in a hotel how hard it is to get good coverage to every room. You will also have new pockets of interference and poor coverage every time someone adds their own AP for their non-WiFi Internet service. And even if the coverage is good, the stronger the signal the lower level of output does your mobile device require to operate which means longer battery life. That is very noticeable on a cell phone when I'm in the city center with fu
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Because getting Wifi to work over a full mile is pretty close to impossible. Hell, just within a building can be difficult.
I'm currently posting this over an unsecured Wifi network, because no ISP will return my calls about buying my own connection (probably because the apartment has contracted for "free" internet for everyone starting in a few weeks). It's within the same building, seemingly even on the same floor, and yet it's dodgy enough that I can't even watch Youtube videos most of the time, and my ba
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A mile is pushing it, but a $50 AP running DD-WRT can be configured as a wireless repeater. I've used high-power Buffalo units to do exactly that.
Microwaves only pose problems with a weak signal and ground-level receivers... Put the antenna on your roof, and you'll be able to use your microwave all you want.
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They used 2.4 and 5GHz as well as the new 3.65GHz band (very narrow for now).
We often shot 13+ miles with off the shelf equipment.
Go look at ubnt.com, they have some cool TDMP stuff called AirMax.
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Enhanced broadband to rural and remote areas [dbcde.gov.au]
http://www.internode.on.net/residential/wireless_broadband/fixed-wireless/terms_and_conditions/#Equipment [on.net]
The "WiMax receivers and base stations must be sufficiently cheap" is the key.
You have to get it right, at both ends - ie skilled people on site and thats not "cheap"
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Why are we all still tied to wires?
Because WiFi is still half-duplex, similar to hubs that many of us used in the mid-90's. 802.11ac starts to address some of the of the simplex issues by placing users on individual spatial streams within a channel, but the communication between the client and the access point is still half-duplex, it's just somewhat isolated from other clients connected to the same AP...
The other major issue is that WiFi is still using ISM frequencies... 900MHz was squashed before WiFi was prevalent, 2.4GHz is squashed now,
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I love how you contradict yourself from one sentence to the next... You say WiFi only goes 100', except for rural areas where it's cheap and works exactly like I've described, huh?
And as for speed, 802.11n gives 600Mbps. Except for the higest tier of FIOS internet service, that's ample bandwidth to share between numerous subscribers, without slowing you down at all.
And it's not like I'm making this stuff up... Large hotels, apartment complexes, office buildings, indoor and outdoor venues, all have been w
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No they wouldn't, because no ISP in an urban location would ever tell their users they need to connect to a tower 10Miles away. You notice I said "last mile" and not "last 20 miles". We're talking WiFi at the end of every block, or so, instead of dragging lines to every house, and having a $100 installer fees.
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The fact that you are incompetent with WiFi is irrelevant, and assuming your experience to be an accurate reflection of the best the technology can do, is pure nonsense.
The fact remains that innumerable hotels, apartment complexes, office buildings, campgrounds, and more, have all been very effectively served by WiFi, without any of the problems you suggest are inherent difficulties.
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That's only even POSSIBLE on the most up-to-date cable infrastructure. I've seen it, but that's the rare exception, NOT the rule. Damn near all cable co's MUST, at a bare minimum, drive out to the POP to swap FILTERS on the coax line.
Seriously, dude, move out of your parent's basement, already, and see how things work out in the real world.
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I used to have WiFi over a distance of 6.4 miles and now I have some CDMA-based crap that doesn't have enough frames for me to torrent. Nothing wrong with directional WiFi. You can use it on houses pretty close together, too, with directional antennae.
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Or maybe just wifi that does not stop working everytime someone microwaves a burrito.