802.11ad Will Knock Your Socks Off, Says Interop Panel

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."

Re:So what?

[damn_registrars]

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:Lord.

[CastrTroy]

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.

Re:Means exactly dick.

[Anonymous Coward]

> 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.

Re:Why arent ISPs using WiFi for last-mile?

[evilviper]

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.

Yes - but the upside...

[NotQuiteReal]

Your tin-foil hats will finally be effective!

Re:So what?

[Anonymous Coward]

If that image is NSFW then our social norms are now totally fscked up..

Wow this world puzzles me...

Re:Means exactly dick.

[girlintraining]

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.

IEEE 802

[unixisc]

IEEE 802.12 is not WLAN - it's 100BaseVG [wikipedia.org] While that group may have been disbanded, IEEE 802 is their set of standards dealing w/ LANs and MANs, and then, the number after the period deals w/ different aspects of it, such as 1 for bridging, 3 for ethernet, 11 for WLAN (all the ones in b/w were used by other networking technologies, such as Token Bus, Fiber Optic TAG and so on, but are mostly currently disbanded.) IEEE 15 through 22 are the next active standards, but none having much to do w/ WLAN.

Re:So what?

[FrankDrebin]

Not sure why this is modded funny. 60 GHz is license-free because oxygen is opaque at that frequency [wikipedia.org].

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:That's actually the point

[SeaFox]

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.

Re:That's actually the point

[neokushan]

I'm guessing the main bit would be this:

The idea is that the localized but high-bandwidth 60GHz network can be used for specific, highly demanding tasks, keeping the standard 5GHz frequency free for normal use

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.

Re:So what?

[pikine]

My apartment is in a high rise that has concrete walls between rooms, and 5GHz is already having issues penetrating that. The wavelength is about 6cm and the wall is double the thickness. It works great in the same room with the WiFi access point, but the one next to it suffers severe signal loss. I imagine the EHF band is strictly same-room only---even a thin sheet of glass would entirely block the milliliter wave---so being attenuated at 10db per kilometer by oxygen and water vapor at 60GHz isn't a great deal.