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."
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: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: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
mesh networks (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Lord. (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
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.
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.