7Gbps Wi-Fi Networking Kit Could Launch In 2010 156
Mark.JUK writes "Wireless Local Area Networking (WLAN 802.11) adapters capable of speeds 'up to' 7Gigabits per second could be in stores by the end of this year. The Wireless Gigabit Alliance (WiGig), which seeks to advance the worldwide adoption and use of 60GHz wireless networking technology, has published a unified specification for its approach and opened an Adopter Program. The move means that WiGig members can now begin developing a Wi-Fi kit that uses the unlicensed 60GHz spectrum."
The keyword: (Score:2, Insightful)
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"Could".
If it's everything they promise then "could" becomes "cloud".
Re:The keyword: (Score:4, Insightful)
Yep, industries always slows down implementation of new technologies in order to keep sort of a backlog in the pipeline of new technologies available for marketing purposes. By slowing down the pace, they also save in R&D because they make their investment in a given technology more profitable by extending the lifetime of the said technology.
I know some will say that this is contrary to free market rules, the company owning a new technology should rush it out the doors. But the big players might often be involved in some kind of collusion not always known to the general public. Really breakthrough technologies are often bought by the biggest players and put on a shelf.
This is true in all kind of fields. The important thing is to keep the appearance of a free market so consumers are happy ;-)
After all, corporations are there to make to most money possible, not to make the technological world move faster at their own expense.
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I know some will say that this is contrary to free market rules, the company owning a new technology should rush it out the doors. But the big players might often be involved in some kind of collusion not always known to the general public.
OH! I know this one! It's that most insidious of taboos, a practice only endorsed by the greediest and biggest fish in the pond. I think it's called "testing" or "improving reliability" or something.
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Is this the industry that launched 802.11N before the draft specification had even hit 2.0, and 6 years before the spec was finished? That were selling computers "With Vista" (upgrade coupons) almost two years before vista launched? That
I don't disagree that many industries milk adequate-but-not-best technologies because they're more profitable at the moment. But the consumer tech industry has a tendency to push things out the door before they're done.
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> But the consumer tech industry has a tendency to
> push things out the door before they're done.
Collusion talks don't always end up with agreements. There are some wars going on. In some cases although, when an important monetary impact is unavoidable for all of them, the most important players might come to an agreement. In other cases, you end up with a split decision, where there is more than one side. A group of players on one side and another group of players on another side.
It is still a free m
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I don't agree that it is a trivial conclusion in the consumer-grade tech industry. What you're describing is a situation where there are few enough competitors in a market that real competition is not the best way to maximize profits. But Netgear needs to spice up their wireless equipment with new proprietary speed-up extensions, or else a half-dozen other manufacturers will take their top speed crown. Intel needs to push the GHZ up, or they can't sell new computers to the same people.
Sure, sinking anoth
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> I don't agree that it is a trivial conclusion in the
> consumer-grade tech industry.
You do not have to agree with me, free speech is a good thing ;-)
I will simply remind you that "consumer-grade" is the biggest market simply because there are more customers. This becomes especially true nowadays since more and more people have access to tech industry products compared to the situation a few decades ago.
> What you're describing is a situation where there are few
> enough competitors in a market t
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> you would realize that competition is the only
> way to maximize profits.
Of course.
You must also believe in infinite growth and infinite optimization of your manufacturing process.
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They have to sell new stuff. Preferably new stuff with brand new intellectual property. Preferably something that makes the old stuff look like drek. Preferably something that has a committee of dozens of people that won't agree, so that as you cite, the draft standard takes nearly a decade to be be ratified. By then, we'll be on to the new 120Ghz platform, with new encoding that will actually get data to you before you ask for it.
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> By then, we'll be on to the new 120Ghz platform,
> with new encoding that will actually get data to
> you before you ask for it.
Exactly, so they do not have to spend any money on implementing slightly better technologies. They just wait for the next big "quantum leap" for as long as possible before jumping into the band wagon.
Of course, this is the global tendency. So there will be cases where what I state doesn't seem to apply but it is generally what is happening in my humble opinion.
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It must be working. I got this five minutes ago.
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;-)
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"After all, corporations are there to make to most money possible, not to make the technological world move faster at their own expense."
The original intent of corporations was to serve the public good and corporations were given charters, some days I think we should revoke the status of these institutions that purposely hold back their best stuff in order to extort money from the public. It is a kind of extortion.
Speed=Good, but How About Distance? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Speed=Good, but How About Distance? (Score:5, Insightful)
At 60 GHz? No. It's hard enough getting that to propagate through air, let alone walls. This is for short-range communication exclusively.
"Municipal WiFi" will never happen on a large scale and in the long run, for this reason: If you want signals to propagate, you need to stick to low enough frequencies, and that means there just isn't enough bandwidth to cover a large number of people at the same time. It just barely works now, and bandwidth demand will only grow. Wires are here to stay: You'll still need to wire every house, every apartment, and have local transceivers if you want a wireless connection. There just isn't enough bandwidth in the open air.
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Well, you are correct that 60 Ghz will be horrible for distance. However, the wiring just has to be smart. There is gigabit powerline ethernet [bestbuy.com], which requires no additional wiring. So you could have that, and then a wireless AP (7Gbps) in the room if you really want the wireless/ Meanwhile, you may as well just have a regular ethernet line from that powerline ethernet adapter. Really, that thing is pretty portable on it's own and makes me question why people even want wifi in some instances. The portability
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The power-line Ethernet you link to is a short-distance in-home consumer product (competes with ethernet or wifi, not DSL or cable internet). The municipal (long distance) power-line stuff is no better than utilizing existing phone line or cable wires to the residence. Further, it has a lot of problems not present in DSL or cable internet, such as major RF interference.
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This has 0 to do with DSL or cable. Neither does the article. What's your point of that sidetrack? This isn't broadband over powerline. Why didn't you read anything. This is ethernet over wiring, not even powerline. It's not intended for long distance. Way to go on the reading comprehension there.
You'll find the RF interference is nonexistent for this class of device. The devices are tolerant of it and have built in compensation. TV's on, microwave on, wireless networking on, cellphones on, no issues.
I have
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Will this "new, magical and unicorn-like" WiFi travel further? Far enough for municipal WiFi to effectively cover its citizens?
That is a quote from WrongSizeGlass, the post that started the thread you were replying to when you suggested the power-line ethernet. So, yes, if you had read the thread before posting, we were discussing broadband here.
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he implied that it might be used for muni-wifi. It is obviously not for outdoors in general. However, there are ways that an outdoors powerline ethernet system *could* be set up by a local municipality if they wanted to, for outdoors use. It'd be just as easy to snoop as wifi and probably not as practical, however.
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again, they don't have to be on the same circuit. It is claimed but it will work anyway, but that's what you can get small amounts of interference. We're talking a 54mb connection down to 50mb. However, packetloss vs wifi? Packetloss ends up around the ethernet equivalent.
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How about an automatically adapting network of "line-of-sight" connections?
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Or in other words, a city full of little mirrors ;)
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Access points every 10 feet :)
Re: Wires are here to stay (Score:2)
Yes and no.
There are limitations on how much can be transmitted at any given frequency, but a cellular type system of wi-fi could easily be used, probably at 60GHz. (I'm not sure how it is at penetrating walls though.)
Still, there are frequencies that would work. A low-powered cellular system where each repeater could cover, say, 10 blocks. Space them through a city with a 25% overlap, and a municipal network becomes quite plausible. It's no longer the nice, simple, thing that was originally evisioned,
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The problem is exactly that it can't possibly scale. There is only so much bandwidth physically available in each cell, and bandwidth demand isn't going to decrease any time soon. The only thing you can do is shrink the cells, and soon enough you're at the point where your cells are so small that you have to have wires everywhere anyway.
It's still useful, but it'll only be a slow backup for the real network that is using wires of some kind or other (copper, glass, whatever we come up with later).
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It scales quite easily. If a cell gets too densly populated, you double the repeaters and drop the power.
Splitting the cell into four blocks is nicer than merely splitting it into two, but whether that's the reasonable approach depends on the population distribution.
Also if the city sprawls instead of packing, you build more repeaters further out.
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But that is not scaling. It only works for a short while. Then your cells become too small to be useful, and scaling stops.
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Why do you say it isn't scaling? It scales with the number of people.
Why do you say it stops working? It works clear down to each apartment having it's own repeater.
It only stops being useful if you insist that people subscribe to a particular cell. If it's being run by a municipality, then you can change from repeater to repeater without worrying about "can my system work on the new cell?" It's true that this is a bother if each cell requires a new contract of something, as in "You were in a GTE cell, b
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It would certainly make a a real fun evening entertainment of collecting a few hundred BR Movies just for the sheer hell of it!
That's.. fun? *speechless*
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Having worked in a company which used laser networking... that thing was darned touchy. My favorite was the 2 weeks of outages we tended to have during the spring for 2 hours every afternoon. Nobody knew why. Eventually it was discovered that at those moments, the sun happened to reflect off of the building JUST RIGHT to blind the laser. Other times it just went down for mysterious orientation reasons, dead boards, etc. Most weather wasn't bad, but fog was a bane of existence.
I love laser networking te
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Line of sight will never be useful for anything but static connections, if even those. It has no chance of working indoors, and even outdoors, you'll be constantly losing line of sight.
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Will this "new, magical and unicorn-like" WiFi travel further? Far enough for municipal WiFi to effectively cover its citizens? If so then the increased coverage is more important than the speed improvement (even though the speed bump is might impressive).
At 60GHz you need line-of-sight to make a connection.. walls, buildings, trees, are all a signal killer; much more so than at 2.5/5 GHz. In general in a cluttered environment, your signal will propagate further with a longer wavelength (lower frequency, think AM/FM radio). So in short, no. It will not travel as far.
For line of sight point-to-point applications you can get very high gain from a 60GHz dish (same size dish as 2.5GHz is electrically much larger in wavelengths), though they will probably be
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The higher the frequency the worse the propagation.
Already 5 GHz is a step down from 2.4 GHz when it comes to penetrating walls.
There's a reason long range wireless technologies use lower frequencies (and that's not only reflection off the ionosphere).
Just consider how weak satellite TV-signals are, and those usually only travel a few 100 kilometers off of 100-Watt-class emitters. Here the high frequencies are probably chosen to prevent reflection off the ionosphere...
Beyond 300 Ghz, even the athmosphere be
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The higher the frequency the worse the propagation. Already 5 GHz is a step down from 2.4 GHz when it comes to penetrating walls. There's a reason long range wireless technologies use lower frequencies (and that's not only reflection off the ionosphere).
Just consider how weak satellite TV-signals are, and those usually only travel a few 100 kilometers off of 100-Watt-class emitters. Here the high frequencies are probably chosen to prevent reflection off the ionosphere... Beyond 300 Ghz, even the athmosphere becomes opaque...
There most certainly is a reason: The laws of Physics state that Frequency and Wavelength are inversely proportional.
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According to their site, with beamforming, the range is around 10m: http://wirelessgigabitalliance.org/specifications [wirelessgi...liance.org]
I wouldn't hold my breath on this becoming a standard. Now, something they say on this page does interest me; it looks like it is marketed for PC peripherals and display interfaces. You might see this being more common as a wireless HDMI, or wireless link for that portable hard drive. In this use, line of site and range isn't a big deal, so kind of a replacement for Bluetooth type uses, a
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Oxygen resonates at 60GHz, so range will be crap. Like all unlicensed bands, 60GHz is unlicensed because it is a crappy band. All the good bands are strictly reserved for the exclusive use of the highest (or most crooked) bidder.
Given what the tech industry has been able to make out of unlicensed use of the 2.4 GHz band (undesirable for commercial use due to water absorbing it and microwave ovens using it) imagine what it could do if it got part of a more desirable band currently used mostly to provide poor
real bandwidth (Score:2, Interesting)
What's the real bw available? 2 Gbps?
With 802.11n we get max 90Mbps from the carrier's 300; that's only 30% eficiency. I hope it's better this time.
Doesn't Matter if Throttled (Score:2)
It doesn't matter if you're throttled. I barely use bandwidth, and I'm still throttled all to hell.
Re:Doesn't Matter if Throttled (Score:5, Insightful)
> It doesn't matter if you're throttled. I barely use bandwidth, and I'm still throttled all to hell.
That's only true if your only IP traffic is via your throttled connection to the Internet. Who doesn't have a big media file server somewhere on their LAN these days?
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Me, and I don't have any friends that do either.
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True, but this kit is also quite tasty for streaming HD content around your house.
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Still WLAN, not everywhere (Score:1)
Faster networking speeds in the home and office (and coffee shops, I guess) is always a good thing, and we should hope that technologies that bring this about continue to progress.
But the real problem for many mobile users is networking speeds outside the office. At customer sites, in transit, and during leisure time activities, having fast, reliable network access is still a dream. You can expect slow and unreliable cellular service most places, but it's like stepping back to the bad old days of 56kbps to
Oh crap! (Score:3, Funny)
I'd better prepare the tin foil to head off my 60Ghz allergy.
60GHz? (Score:2)
Am I correct in thinking that as the frequency of microwave radiation increases towards the infrared end (1THz), the radiation behaves more like infrared, i.e. impermeable through the thermal insulation of buildings? 60Ghz seems a big jump from the usual 2-5GHz for wifi.
not a "mobile" technology (Score:5, Interesting)
As I understand it, this is a replacement for running a fibre optic link between your house and your ISP. Instead, you mount an antenna on your roof, which engages in narrow beam, line of sight 60 GHz communication with your ISP. I think the benefits are that it is potentially cheaper than running a fibre optic cable to your house. The signal is attenuated by rain, and by atmospheric oxygen. I doubt the signal can travel very well through walls. And I don't think it is useful for mobile devices.
Doug Moen
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Be great for sharing an Internet connection among a remote rural community though. One of these to pointed at the ISP and a bunch more forming a mesh network.
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Be great for sharing an Internet connection among a remote rural community though. One of these to pointed at the ISP and a bunch more forming a mesh network.
Ignore FCC regs and you can get 100 miles using satellite dishes and 802.11b. If you don't cause any interference, they won't be knocking at your door.
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Ignore FCC regs and you can get 100 miles using satellite dishes and 802.11b. If you don't cause any interference, they won't be knocking at your door.
I have my doubts. I've done 45 miles LOS with 900MHz and 17dbi yagis. 2.4GHz won't have nearly the penetration, and I'm not sure the increased gain of a pair of dishes would make up for it.
Then there's that little issue of the curvature of the earth. Even if you can get .11b to penetrate 100 miles of air, well, good luck finding 2 points with 100 miles of nothing but air between them. I'm not saying it's impossible, just way less likely than a person might infer from reading your post.
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Then there's that little issue of the curvature of the earth. Even if you can get .11b to penetrate 100 miles of air, well, good luck finding 2 points with 100 miles of nothing but air between them. I'm not saying it's impossible, just way less likely than a person might infer from reading your post.
A person might be lame, but there are several reports of using off-the-shelf amplifiers with recycled (reused, really) full-size satellite TV dishes and getting over 100 miles. Finding that much line of sight is an exercise left to the reader. I have plans to develop a solar-powered bridge, it's obviously not much of a challenge, to work around a LoS problem. But I plan to use baby dishes and no amplifiers to make shorter hops. I have almost everything I need already, since it's not all that difficult a job
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I've done 17 miles at 5.7GHz with Motorola Canopy, legally, without bending any Part 15 rules, using reflectors that are only a couple of feet across. It's been working for years.
802.11x shouldn't behave much differently.
(Disclaimer: Mostly flat terrain. Radios at 150-200 feet above ground at each end. Etc. But, still...)
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You can get several miles line-of sight without boosting power just by using dishes and a good home made collector. Additionally, some of the 802.11 channels are in the amateur bands, so if you get your HAM license, you can use all the power you need legally (again, ensuring you don't cause interference to other users -ie., directional only).
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And don't use encryption or conduct business over that link. Hams have somewhat strict use rules in exchange for that RF power output. :)
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Would you use an ISP that ignored FCC regulations?
Not if I knew about it. But, I would set such a system up myself to solve last-mile problems. Exceeding power limits should be illegal; if you don't bother anyone with it, you won't get in trouble anyway :p
Sooo considering... (Score:2)
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This is going to suck for most uses (Score:5, Informative)
So the higher the frequency of your signal, the more bandwidth you can get. Easy to understand why. However there is a tradeoff, and that is distance/penetration. Low frequency signals can travel extremely long distances, and penetrate through material well. The ultimate example is the sub communication systems like Seafarer. That system, operating at a 76Hz carrier, could penetrate the entire Earth and send signals to submerged subs anywhere, at a rate of about 3 characters per minute.
So as you go up, the opposite is true. Go up to the 100s of GHz and you can carry astounding amounts of data if you like, but you find that the air itself will attenuate your signal a whole lot, and forget about a wall or the like.
This is why there's competition for various ranges of the spectrum, like 700MHz. One range is not as good as any other. Were that the case, we'd have no problem as there is plenty of space up in the high GHz range. However it's not. Low frequency spectrum can be very useful for things.
At 60GHz, you are going to need line of sight pretty much. It might penetrate a bit of stuff, but you can forget about having an access point 5 rooms over that goes through a few walls.
For a point-to-point outdoor link it'd work ok, though it would be the kind of thing that would suffer from reduced data rate or a completely dropped signal in the rain and rain plays hell on signals that high frequency.
So I can see it for special cases, but the next WiFi it will not be.
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That's a bit like saying, the lighter the paint color of the car, the cheaper you can get it.
No, it's not easy to understand why.
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Ok perhaps I'm giving geeks too much credit. For the /. crowd, I wouldn't think understanding that a higher frequency can carry more data would be difficult. It all comes down to C = B log2 (1 + S/N), the Shannon-Hartley theorem. In that theory, C is the amount of information you get and B is the bandwidth, in Hertz, of your channel. Ok well if your carrier is 76Hz, your channel is maybe a couple Hertz wide. However if your carrier is 100GHz, you could have a channel that is a few hundred MHz wide. Given th
Doesn't matter. (Score:5, Interesting)
For most practical purposes, 60GHz signals don't penetrate anything. They just bounce around like light.
This stuff might be good for fixed point-to-point links, but that's about it.
I've worked a bit with existing 60GHz products, and while they're generally faster than greased shit, the alignment of them is typically very critical and, sometimes, even seasonal. This isn't the sort of product that would be useful for municipal wifi, except perhaps as a backhaul between 802.11 radios.
Of course, like any new product where there's money to be made, the marketers will claim that it slices, it dices, and it makes Julienne fries. Caveat emptor, etc. (But wait! There's more! If you act now, the sky will always be blue, you'll always be young, and you'll ejaculate rainbows.)
Meh.
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If it is actually that LOS dependent, it isn't entirely clear that this will all be less
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"60GHz signals don't penetrate anything. They just bounce around like light"
You're not just kidding about that. Police Ka-band traffic radar operates at around 34Ghz, specifically *because* it reflects so well. It's not going to get any better at a higher frequency.
I'll wait (Score:1, Funny)
Please. Someone tell me. What is the point (Score:2)
My internet connection ( DSL ) can't come anywhere near saturating my 802.11g router's 54Gbps. If my wireless connection is 10Mbps or 100Gbps, what does it matter? Unless I have a fiber optic line running to my home, how do I benefit from faster wireless? So at work I can open my TPS report off the local outlook server a fraction of a second more quickly?
I'm limited by the speed of my DSL, not the wireless connection speed.
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Re:Please. Someone tell me. What is the point (Score:4, Informative)
You have an 802.11g router that's rated at 54 Gbps?
The cable company ran fibre down the next street last year. They're offering 50mpbs now (+ phone + video on demand, so there's enough headroom that they could easily offer 100mbps), and they'll keep upping it every few years, as demand (marketing) warrants.
Most homes have more than one computer nowadays. Moving files between them, or to / from your smartphone?
Also, since you finish transmitting the data quicker, you free up the channel for other users that much quicker.
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Doh! 54Mbps. Not to self. Drink more coffee before reading slashdot.
I don't know many people with access to fiber. I know. It is coming. Someday.
Most of the time, moving things around involves hitting the internet. A small pipe. I back-up to a USB drive. In many homes, most average Windows users who have never heard of slashdot aren't able to get them networked. It is too complicated. They use gmail to e-mail files from one computer to another. Through the small pipe again. I know. Apple fans ha
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I guess I should be happy I live in Canada, and not the USA. Plans from 1mbps to 50mbps to the home (and I know that they can do at least double that with their current setup). Still a lot slower tha 1gbps in parts of Europe and Asia, though.
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Well, as others pointed out, there's other reasons for having a fast network other than internet access; and you can't expect that your broadband speed won't *eventually* go up. However, I completely agree that broadband speed is seriously lagging what it probably should be. Yes, I'm sure there's any number of posters who can say they've got some special, wonderful fibre hookup, but that isn't yet available to the majority of people. And, honestly, until it is, a faster home network just isn't tremendous
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One of the ideas behind this was for sending hi-def video over wireless. So instead of tons of cables connecting av devices together, they could all aim for this standard.
WiGig (Score:2)
Feature inflation... (Score:3, Insightful)
Consumer companies will jump on this shit like crazy just to maintain teh price point of wireless routers and APs. I always expected to get a 802.11g router for cheap once 802.11n came out. Instead, it's harder to find g routers.
To me, and most people I know, a new 802.11 standard won't mean a row of beans and yet they'll still have to shell out $50 to buy a new router when they spill their coffee on it.
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likely useless (Score:2)
Unless you put APs everywhere so you have line of sight... but... meh.
No (Score:5, Interesting)
Because wired has less problems. Wireless is nice in that, well, it doesn't require wires. So no cables to run. Less hassle in terms of physical effort, and you can move around while using it but that's where the advantages end. Wired has some big advantages:
1) Security. With wireless, there is always the issue of other people listening to your signal. Unless you live in a farady cage, you can't control where that signal goes. That means you have to deal with shit like encrypting the entire signal. That takes additional configuration to make work, and additional hardware to accomplish at high speeds. While AES isn't particularly intensive, try doing it at a gigabit. It'll hit a modern CPU hard and no way some cheap embedded device pulls it off without ASICs to help.
2) Contention. With a wireless system, you are all using the same bandwidth. This means it doesn't scale well with more connections. The more computers you have on it, the lower your total throughput. Not a problem with wired connections, each computer gets dedicated bandwidth to the switch. So I can transfer to you at full bandwidth while two other people also transfer at full bandwidth and there's no contention.
3) Range. Even under pretty good conditions, wireless doesn't match up to the distance you can get from a normal Cat-6 run (100 meters). Of course you also have wired technology for longer runs (like fiber), or you can simply have a switch repeat the signal.
4) Simplicity. While it is more work to lay the wires, once done you have less effort. A system just plugs in and all necessary information can be provided to it, no config necessary. With wireless, configuration must be done on the client machine, at least if any encryption is to be involved.
5) Reliability. Wireless just has problems. Be it interference from other devices on the same band, dead zones, weather, whatever, you can lose wireless signal because of too low a SNR. Not the case with a wired connection. They tend to always work, unless the cable breaks and that is quite rare.
6) Speed. Whatever you can do with wireless, you can probalby do better with wired. Just tends to be the case. This is particularly true if you include fiber in the wired category, but even if not. Right now N is as good as it gets wireless which gets maybe 100mbps of throughput max in terms of actual data (300mbps data rate, but there's tons of overhead). 1gpbs wired is common, 10gbps is available over regular twisted pair. Faster is being developed for normal twisted pair, and faster is already available for fiber or something like CX4.
Nothing wrong with wireless, but it is an addition to wired, not a replacement. I have a WAP so that I can use my laptop everywhere in my house. However my desktop, my Blu-ray, etc are all hard wired. I don't see that changing.
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Number one at least is hugely alleviated at 60Ghz.
If those waves propagate through windowpanes, I'd be amazed...
but everything else is the real deal-killer anyway.
A plugged wire either works, doesn't work or intermittently works. Getting a wire that works is pretty easy and a surefire solution to all medium-issues. Wireless on the other hand ALWAYS works intermittently....except when it doesn't work at all.
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True it wouldn't be much of an issue in the home, but at a business? Still a problem. With a wired connection at work I can say to a high degree of confidence that nobody can snoop my traffic. You'd have to either install a physical tap on the wire (that runs through conduit in the wall) or bust in to a switch and convince it to mirror the data. Either way is highly unfeasible. However with wireless? Just get a computer in range and listen in.
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You didn't understand the point. The routers are working on different channels, but everyone connected to a single wireless router are all on the same channel. So unless each device has its own AP, the bandwidth is shared.
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To add to the other poster's response, there really are just 3 wireless channels in the US: 1, 6, and 11. 1 actually ranges from 1 - 3, 6 ranges from 4 - 8, 11 ranges from 9 - 11.
There are about 28 wireless networks that my computer can see at the moment, all of which are consuming the airspace in one of those 3 channels. Because of this, networks will barely propogate through an entire apartment. If you need to hit two apartments, or a back porch, you need to put up more than one router, making the prob
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Well, there's some noise surrounding a channel, but you really have to listen to the noise (i.e., with the appropriate software) and see what frequencies are being occupied. At my mom's house her wireless barely worked into the next room. It was set by the provider, which set all the other AP's in the area. It's a retirement area. They all get their service from one of two providers, and based on the SSID's, they all are from the same one. None of them change their settings.
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Damned testing AP's. This happened at one place I worked. I had to walk the whole floor with my laptop and do a survey to figure out where some where. A couple had been set up, put in a desk cabinet (while powered) and forgotten. The employee then left the company at some point, but the AP was still live. It was all fun and games until the rogue AP's started to conflict with the channels the bosses wanted to use. I asked pretty much everyone in the company "Do you know anything about th
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Yup. A couple of months ago a friend of mine was complaining to me that he couldn't get good wireless coverage over his house. He described the set-up: a Netgear ADSL router and base station, an Apple Airport Extreme base station connected over Cat5, and an Apple Airport Express as a wireless range extender. He had already spent hours fiddling with channel allocations and power settings, and had already asked the neighbours what channels they are using.
My solution? Turn off the Airport Express and set t
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Yes, the price also kinda beats the free (included in laptop) and $30 (wireless N router) that the typical home user will pay.
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I knew the possibilities of wireless communication - I didn't knew it was so (relatively) inexpensive.
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60km? Nice. :)
I did one once with a panel and a parabolic antenna on Linksys AP's (802.11b) bridged. I asked a friend who did HAM radio stuff to figure out my max range, since I knew the power of the transmitters, gain of the antennas, and length of the cables. He said it'd be over 30 miles (48km), depending on line of sight. The panel was on the 10th floor of an office building, so it was just a matter of being able to see it.
That was in LA though, which 30
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Are there any home use providers in the US that would give you anything approaching speeds where even G couldn't keep up?
The two major residential broadband providers in my area:
Comcast [comcast.com] and Qwest [qwest.com]
Qwest apparently "only" pushes 20mbps downstream with less than 1mbps upstream (that upstream cap is on on all tiers, how odd), whereas Comcast offers 50mbps down and 10mbps up, which could exceed the 54mbps limit of Wireless G. Note that all figures are labelled with asterisks, including 802.11g, that link to a disclaimer saying that all speeds are "theoretical maximums". In a typical usage scenario, you can flood out a Wireless G ro
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The good news is that they aren't trying to broadcast on the km scale. 60GHz would require and obscene amount of power to go that distance, but if you're only looking to get signal from a few meters, it could work out at a reasonable wattage.
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A couple of them have 1gbps NICs but the bottle neck for getting an actual sustained flow of data into the CPU is still the speed of the ISA bus (since none of the promised next generation of super fast buses ever actually appeared in any hardware)
Umm yes they did, PCI beat out ISA years ago and now PCIe is gradually pushing out PCI.
Plus on modern boards the nic is often integrated in the southbridge anyway.