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Wireless Networking IT Hardware

Ultrawideband May Stall Before It Starts 97

Posted by Zonk from the meanwhile-bluetooth-has-a-sundae dept.
judgecorp writes "The IEEE's group for faster Wi-Fi, 802.11n has reached the end-point, with the Intel-backed TGn Sync proposal taking the lead. This is a contrast to the ultrawideband world 802.15.3a, where the competing proposals are slugging it out. Indeed, the vendors could be in for more trouble than they expect getting UWB past regulators in Europe." From the article: "Within the next two years, we should start to see fast wireless links based on ultrawideband (UWB), taking the place of short-range connections such as USB and Firewire, and providing fast data links between consumer goods. Chipmakers are now on the verge of creating the silicon, and vendor groups are completing the standards.But the technology may have trouble getting a world market, as regulators wrestle with the objections of the cellphone industry. UWB standards are in deadlock at the IEEE; but what the regulators say matters far more to the future of the technology."
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Ultrawideband May Stall Before It Starts More

Ultrawideband May Stall Before It Starts

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  • Phew (Score:5, Funny)

    by null etc. ( 524767 ) on Friday March 18, 2005 @04:57PM (#11979413)
    Thank God. I'm getting tired of all these numeric-based standards like "802.15.3a". Pretty soon they'll be using IP addresses for standards, and the IP address will lead to the homepage of the standard.

    When can I get my "mofasterbiggerwider-fi?"

    • Re:Phew (Score:5, Funny)

      by FooAtWFU ( 699187 ) on Friday March 18, 2005 @05:06PM (#11979526) Homepage
      Not just IP addresses... IPv6 addresses. Say hello to the newest wireless standard, 802:153a:e1e1:0aff:5559:1234:dead:beef!
    • I've always hated the "fi" part of "wi-fi"... even the "wi" part, but not nearly as much. Fidelity (where the word hi-fi comes from) has to do with the quality of audio. The high-fidelity audio systems of the past sounded more like music, and less like tin cans. Wireless fidelity is... I would say oxymoronic, but the second term isn't contradictory to the first, it just has nothing to do with it.

      -Jesse
      • I suggest you look up fidelity in a dictionary. Fidelity ~ Quality.
        • I submit that I did look it up in a dictionary, and fidelity does not mean quality, it means accurate reproduction. It had goddamn better high fidelity if it's a digital system... As I said before they really have nothing to do with eachother. Having digital data accurately reproducing itself is one of the most important parts of being digital.

          -Jesse
          • fidelity
            n. pl. fidelities

            1. Faithfulness to obligations, duties, or observances.
            2. Exact correspondence with fact or with a given quality, condition, or event; accuracy.
            3. The degree to which an electronic system accurately reproduces the sound or image of its input signal.

            I don't know about you, but #2 sounds like something I'd want from my wireless hardware.
            Digital != lossless transmission, especially when transmitting using a method prone to interference or signal loss, such as RF.

          • Re:Phew (Score:2, Funny)

            by SA Stevens ( 862201 )
            So you are saying fidelity in a marriage is 'accurate reproduction'??

            Well, actually it is.
      • Wireless fidelity is...

        It smells like bits to me!
  • taking the place of short-range connections such as USB and Firewire, and providing fast data links between consumer goods Wasn't bluetooth suposed to do this? How fast is bluetooth, anway? I guess the advantage would be the distance... BT only allows a few meters at best.

    • Re:Bluetooth (Score:5, Informative)

      by Andyvan ( 824761 ) on Friday March 18, 2005 @05:02PM (#11979478)
      Bluetooth is much slower, typically around 700kbps. Bluetooth consumes much less power, so don't expect Bluetooth to be pushed out on your headset or wireless mouse, for example.

      -- Andyvan
      • Does Bluetooth take less power than UWB per byte? The UWB transmitter need only be turned on for a fraction as long as Bluetooth.
        • "Does Bluetooth take less power than UWB per byte?"

          I don't know.

          Certainly running hot for a small percentage of the time, vs. low power much of the time, will put a different kind of load on a battery.

          Also, waking up every so often and grabbing everything at high speed so that you can go back to sleep again only works if the other side can give you a lot of data during the device's "up" time.

          I would also imagine that waking up might introduce some burstiness, and hence lag, into the data stream.

    • while not for anything like broadband, the new Apple Powerbooks are the first machines to ship with Bluetooth2.0
      i do not know if BT2.0 has any range improvments? i assume not since it still is not intended to replace WiFi.

      from apple.com:

      Bluetooth 2.0+EDR, while still backwards-compatible with Bluetooth 1.x, is up to three times faster than its predecessors, offering a maximum data rate of 3Mbps. As the first company to certify a system supporting Bluetooth 2.0+EDR (enhanced data rate) specification with t

  • Fast Release (Score:5, Insightful)

    by superpulpsicle ( 533373 ) on Friday March 18, 2005 @04:59PM (#11979441)
    802.11n faster than 100 Mbit/s. Are we for real here. Isn't this the 4th protocol released in 2 years? Why don't we wait just another year for 1000 Mbit/s.

    • Re:Fast Release (Score:3, Interesting)

      by rokzy ( 687636 )
      wireless is pretty good at the moment ("wireless-g + bluetooth ought to be enough...").

      so go away and don't come back until you standards people have something that will mean monitors don't need physical connections to computers.

      that's the only thing I can think of at the moment that will actually allow a qualitative change in the power of wireless technology - everything else is just bigger-numbers-BS.

      • Re:Fast Release (Score:3, Insightful)

        by timeOday ( 582209 )

        that's the only thing I can think of at the moment that will actually allow a qualitative change in the power of wireless technology - everything else is just bigger-numbers-BS.

        Well I disagree. The problem is that in Wireless there are often some number of users sharing the airwaves, so what starts off sounding like a big number diminishes quickly.

        Plus, if you want to use repeaters to extend the range (e.g. wireless mesh), the total bandwidth required is multiplied once again.

        When a trainload of peo

      • Because obviously gigabit ethernet is useless too...
      • Okay, what's the point of a "wireless" monitor?

        You have to have it plugged into the wall for power. Even if it was battery powered, it would still need periodic recharging. Are you actually going to take it and carry it somewhere else? I have never understood people's need for wireless mice/keyboards when 95% of the time they keep them in the exact. same. place.

  • 802.15 (Score:5, Funny)

    by slavemowgli ( 585321 ) * on Friday March 18, 2005 @04:59PM (#11979448) Homepage
    It's obvious why this is doomed to fail: we all know that all good networking-related standards are in the 802.11 range. If we start with 802.15 now, soon enough, we'd actually be able to tell them apart easily some day! And that obviously can't be had - how else are the "experts" going to make money then? :)

    • Re:802.15 (Score:1, Funny)

      by gibson042 ( 844355 )
      Sir, let me introduce you to the solution you've been waiting for: our fantastic iTripoly Clusterfsck 2.0 allows for easy realtime synergistic interoperability between Bluetooth, Wi-Fi a/b/g/n, ZigBee, WiMax, UWB, WUSB, PTA, WTF, and more 802 standards than you can shake a stick at. If you have more than one wireless device (and we know you do), then you need this so that your TV can finally set your coffee maker. Add in your PDA, wireless lightswitches and internet router, and we'll have you pumped so fu

  • Why are you listening? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Nom du Keyboard ( 633989 ) on Friday March 18, 2005 @05:05PM (#11979511)
    regulators wrestle with the objections of the cellphone industry

    Why are regulators even listening to the cell phone industry? Existing monopolies should not be allowed to control new technologies in their own best interests.

    • Re:Why are you listening? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by imsabbel ( 611519 ) on Friday March 18, 2005 @05:23PM (#11979688)
      because there is an installed base of about 1.5 billion devices that may be affected by ill effects of new wireless standarts?

    • Re:Why are you listening? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by bostonsoxfan ( 865285 ) on Friday March 18, 2005 @05:30PM (#11979765)
      It is the power of the purse. These industries and companies pay millions into politics just so they can get special consideration in situations like these.

      I want to know about the costs of this, and the relative power here because if I need to be with ten feet to use it at 100Mbit/s then there really is no point.

      • I very much want to see recording devices embedded into the humans which we elect to office. And never removed; that's the price you pay for seeking to be a master.

        Then the power of the purse will be greatly reduced. They can't accept bribes or even discuss them while in office (of course, there's the time leading up to being elected that they could make these arrangements, so it's not airtight), and everything they do is monitored and available to the citizens.

        Then government will truly be transparen

    • Because of Radio Interference (Score:5, Insightful)

      by billstewart ( 78916 ) on Friday March 18, 2005 @05:38PM (#11979859) Journal
      Spectrum Regulators have two reasons for justifying their existence - (1) protecting monopolies of the politically well-connected, and (2) preventing new equipment from interfering with existing equipment. Since this article isn't intended to be flamebait, I'll leave the first along (:-) The EU's response to the wireless part of the late 90s technology boom was to auction off their spectrum to the EU cellphone carriers, who spent $100 Billion trying to outbid each other for the opportunity to become 3G-powered Mozillionaires (just about when the boom was ending, helping fuel mass telecom company bankruptcy problems.) So that spectrum is very valuable to its owners, at least as a sunk cost, and anything that interferes with it is a problem, and it's the regulators' job to protect the spectrum they've sold.

      Of course, UWB technology is designed to pretty much not interfere with anything else, and it's far better at it than WiFi, which has already annoyed the regulatory environment by being wildly successful in large part *because* its development isn't limited by regulators. So 99% of the "interference" is "people might buy UWB instead of 3G", but that's expressed in technical terms of "they might garble a few bits on our services which are fairly robust, have built-in ECC, and run TCP protocols which detect and correct for errors", so the 3G owners ask for unreasonably low power levels for UWB and the regulators go along with them. In reality, the equipment will probably have user-adjustable signal levels, they'll get type-approved with the Eurocrat settings, and users will immediately crank them up to US power levels, which still won't bother anybody.

    • well, the regulators want to arrange their meetings by phone.

      besides than that.. wanna bet that some of these companies pushing for this ARE in fact in cellphone industry themselfs?
    • damn straight they should be.. they have extremely large investments in tradiational radio and large segments of their market depend on low SNR communication.. large scale deployment of UWB will increase noise floors, therefore decreaseing SNR's, therefore decreasing the range of your cell phones.. as well as other RF equipment.. UWB ideally is a truely revolutionary technology, but in the real world is completly unfeasable. I can't possibly see any regulation body allowing mass deployment of UWB any time s

  • New Aaron spelling show (Score:5, Funny)

    by Crimsane ( 815761 ) <clarke@nullfs.com> on Friday March 18, 2005 @05:09PM (#11979558) Homepage
    Beverly hills 802.1*

    next weeks episode features 50% more petty vendor squabbling and competitors attempt to sabotage.

  • Security (Score:5, Insightful)

    by SeaFox ( 739806 ) on Friday March 18, 2005 @05:12PM (#11979589)
    Wont this lead to lots of overhead on the connections for encryption/security? If everyone is using wireless to connect all their printers, keyboards, mice, ect, there exists a very real threat of data theft over the air, especially with the range of WiFi compared to existing Bluetooth devices. Forget spyware keyloggers on your machine, how about ones across the street!

    We'll need a secure channel of communications for every device, even one as low bandwidth consumption as a keyboard.

    • Re:Security (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Tenebrious1 ( 530949 )
      there exists a very real threat of data theft over the air, especially with the range of WiFi compared to existing Bluetooth devices. Forget spyware keyloggers on your machine, how about ones across the street!

      No kidding. The FBI will no longer need a big white van filled with Tempest equipment, they'll be able to sit in their k-car with a laptop and directional antenna, and just log everything...

    • Well, the UWB contenders both promise a secure channel for each participating device. Overhead? HW will take care of that part. The overhead will be in silicon, just a bit.

      And anyway, with UWB output power limits, you'd need to be very close to have a chance to pick it up. Normal range is going to be up to 10 meters (just short of 11 yards).

      The rates will be up to 480Mbps.

      GGF
      • Normal range is going to be up to 10 meters (just short of 11 yards).

        Sure, that's for the normal, tiny antenna. But as the parent posted about a TEMPEST van, these guys could actually receive, amplify, and display a computer screen from across the block, just from the EM radiation.

        So the FBI guy ends up with an antenna filling his trunk, an antenna that looks like a auxillery cell or cb antenna. Still easier than trying to tap a 100Mbit or 1Gbit land line.
        • The standards (sorry - I am only familiar with one side of the UWB arena) define security measures:
          1. All traffic is encrypted.
          2. There are anti-replay counters.
          3. There are multiple-key exchanges.
          4. A method for ensuring devices can't be "impersonated".

          Don't get me wrong - I don't believe these measures are going to help. The only thing that's going to ensure your data's safety from prying eyes, is if you are sufficiently paranoid.

          It's like the thing with viruses - you put an anti-virus on your PC, and t
          • 1. Sure, all traffic is encrypted. But how much? Any governmental hacking attempt will record the waves for later decoding, using the big computer banks. True security will be difficult.
            2. Sure, you won't be able to just replay a bit of traffic to duplicate results. But my concern is that this kind of system is going to be designed to be so easy to set up that all sorts of holes.

            I agree, this system is most likely going to be unsecure.
    • Threat is one thing I'd be worried about for sure.

      Then comes the questions of price. USB is cheap, I doubt this will "outcheap" it. I don't want an extra 10-20$ extra tacked onto everything I buy - and have to buy PCI (and PCMCIA?) cards for all my PCs so I can use the devices (might add a small cost to new PCs as well)

      And third, even if we eliminate the concerns of being irradiated by dozens of RF devices day long at home and work (including small children), there's still the interference problem. I've h
      • First of all, if your comments are regarding UWB, you should probably take the time to learn something about UWB.

        Secondly, since when are small children RF devices?

  • what kind of bandwidth does uwb supposedly promise to support?

    (if there are competing standards, what are each of their bandwidths?)
    • There are 2 competing groups:
      i) Motorola-side, using "Direct Sequence Spread-Spectrum".
      ii) Intel (MBOA), using a different method.

      Both promise about .5Gbps at up to 10 meters range.

      GGF
    • Therefore the bandwidth is almost unlimited, by definition. You could almost think of it as sending data in parallel rather than serially. It promises very high bandwidth, which you might think is great, free and easy with no consequences. But there's no such thing as a free lunch.

      OK, so what they're really doing is swapping from the time domain to the frequency domain to transmit data. What this does is add noise to all of the frequencies it operates over, and with a name like Ultra Wide Band as you might

  • Interference issues: raising the N in SNR (Score:5, Interesting)

    by G4from128k ( 686170 ) on Friday March 18, 2005 @05:22PM (#11979680)
    The core objection is that ultrawideband steps on other people's spectrum used by other applications such as cell phones, satellite broadcasts, GPS, etc. Proponents claim that because the technology is ultrawideband, it deposits very little energy in any narrow slice of spectrum used by these other users. Opponents worry about what happens when a UWB transmitter is near one of there devices (yes, it can interfere with GPS) or if the world becomes saturated with UWB devices.

    The problem is that each UWB device will raise the noise level in all the spectral bands that it covers. With enough UWB devices (or short enough distances to a UWB device), the utility of these other bands will drop. If you paid 5 billion dollars for something, you might scream if someone else started degrading the performance of your investment.
    • There are many real problems, but the "killing" problem is the "commercial interference" the UWB will create on the cellphone industrie. Companies have paid between 5 and 50 Billion for a technology that is currently only making porn barron rich. And now some people under the false asumption that newer better technology should change something are trying to offer a technology that is faster and whose only "drawback" is that you might loose your connection if you are mouving very fast while downloading that
    • Yeah UWB does raise the noise floor for a large swathe of the spectrum (The reason it does this, and I'm referring to the impulse radio version of UWB, is that it transmists using impulses, which is spread out all over the place in terms of the freq. domain). So what you have is a little bit of added noise over all the licensed channels.

      Now, how traditional communications channels work is they transmit at higher frequencies, but concentrate their energy in a small slice of that frequency - hopefully the pa
      • the additional noise energy UWB adds is very very minute in a single frequency range (UWB has incredibly low power spectral density by design; the energy of the signal is spread over a huge spectrum)

        thats right, but the fear of UWB opponents is that when you have lots of UWB devices around (once it becomes mainstream), the noise may sum up to a level that it can jam the narrowband devices.

    • >Opponents worry about what happens when a UWB transmitter is near one of their devices (yes, it can interfere with GPS)

      This is such a great example of the pot calling the kettle black. GPS interferes with everything! It interferes with speakers and wireless connections of all kinds. When I receive a call in my home office on my cell phone - my PC speakers buzz like fog horns, my cordless house phone starts searching for its base, my baby monitor receiver goes crazy, and if I stand close enough my

  • What end-point? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Wesley Felter ( 138342 ) <wesley@felter.org> on Friday March 18, 2005 @05:37PM (#11979843) Homepage
    The "end-point" of the IEEE standards process is when the standard is issued, which is probably a year away in the case of 802.11n. The fact that one proposal is inching ahead of another in the voting is notable, but there's still plenty of work to be done.
  • UwB is nice, but remember it is a two-edged sword. the faster it is, the more bandwidth it takes, the more it interferes with other things.
    • How is UWB going to use "more bandwidth"? It uses the entire spectrum, regardless of speed.

      UWB signals look like noise to frequency tethered devices.

  • This says it all (Score:5, Insightful)

    by iminplaya ( 723125 ) on Friday March 18, 2005 @06:02PM (#11980117) Journal
    FTA: The problem is, those speaking for the telecoms industry sometimes find themselves arguing for more stringent controls on UWB devices than on "unintentional radios", ordinary electronic equipment - or even from the thermal radiation produced by human beings. This tends to irritate the vendors and UWB proponents, as it seems to suggest that the European mobile industry is not objecting to the noise - but the simple fact that people are communicating without their say-so.
    Emphasis mine.

  • You Be The Judge (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Doc Ruby ( 173196 ) on Friday March 18, 2005 @06:11PM (#11980195) Homepage Journal
    Does judgecorp work for Intel? The IEEE group voted 56:44% for the TGnSync protocol to become the standard instead of WWiSE, far short of the minumum 75% needed for approval (the 12% lead is IEEE news itself calls the vote "inconclusive", hardly the "end-point". Rather, everyone involved believes that the two consortia will revise their specs to merge them for the strong consensus required for approval, in a process that will continue for at least another year.

    I note that even in the TechWorld article, by Peter Judge (which won't specify just how far from decisive was the actual vote), doesn't quite distort the status as "reached the end-point". But the Slashdot story, submitted by judgecorp, spins it even further than than TechWorld. Again, does judgecorp work for Intel, as well as TechWorld, paid to spin IEEE news more when there's less editorial oversight?
    • the IEEE news itself [eet.com]

      The 12% lead is <1/4 the 50% margin necessary for passage.

      Darn "<" entity.
    • Read the Techworld article [techworld.com]. It does give the voting figures. It also says the vote "failed to provide an outright winner". What it also reports is that an Airgo statement gives a strong reason to hope for a merger of the proposals - something in contrast with the UWB deadlock.

      In my original Slashdot submission, I believe I wrote "end-game" rather than "end-point", which seems fair. It either got changed or I mis-typed (in which case I apologise) - I can't check which here.

      Either way, your accusation
  • The problem with UWB is that it works great for one single device, but not so great once you have 100 million of the buggers running around. There's only so much bandwidth in the whole spectrum, so the "low noise due to wide-band modulation" argument would not hold once millions of these devices got made.


    In the software world we're used to super-duper-ultra-wideband spaces: MD5 hashes are a good example. You don't have to bother decolliding MD5 hashes -- there are so many that no two documents are likely to ever collide by chance. But you can't just "add more bits" to the electromagnetic spectrum: once you get down below about a centimeter, you might as well be using infrared instead of radio.

    It's the same problem as those RF-excited plasma light bulbs that were all the rage a while ago: the first 10,000 or so work great -- but by the time you deployed 10 of 'em to every household in America, nobody's radio would work any more.

    • "The problem with UWB is that it works great for one single device, but not so great once you have 100 million of the buggers running around.There's only so much bandwidth in the whole spectrum, so the "low noise due to wide-band modulation" argument would not hold once millions of these devices got made."

      I don't think you really understand the concern here. UWB's main caveat is that it would raise the noise floor, making traditional wireless signals *possibly* harder to decode. UWB has extremely short ran
      • Well, the analogy is a bit strained since it's between a noise floor limited discrimination and a single bit; but in both cases the problem is finding enough "signal space" to hold all the data you want to transmit.

        Normal radios use a simple discriminator: the carrier frequency. UWB devices use a code-multiplex discrimator that operates on frequencies much as a hash function operates on bit values.

        The rub is -- what is "properly designed" and how likely is it?
    • UWB uses time devision, not frequency division. I'm not familiar with the implementations under consideration by the IEEE, but in theory all UWB signals are identical. The encode information by existing or not existing at a specific moment in time.
  • I'm such a gadget/wireless fan. I've been hyped about Bluetooth for 10 years. They said it wasn't going to get a foothold, but I'd say it's here to stay. v1.0 was slow but worked, now we've got v2.0 (in Apple's latest products of course, they're support is so critical). People never understood what BT was for - short-range and low bandwidth. Mice, keyboards, game controllers, headsets (!! still no good ones though).

    UwB is great because of it's radiowave penetration. It can go through a lot because o

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