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Networking Wireless Networking Hardware

Wi-Fi Times Sixteen 254

Posted by CmdrTaco from the thats-a-lot-of-broadband dept.
2Stupid2KnowIt writes "eWeek has a cool review of Xirrus' XS-3900 Wireless LAN Array. The unit consists of 16 Integrated Access Points and a wireless switch....all in one device. According to their website, Xirrus can achieve 800+ Mbps of bandwidth and handle 1000+ users. Finally enough bandwidth for us all to cut the cord?"
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Wi-Fi Times Sixteen More

Wi-Fi Times Sixteen

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  • cut the cord? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by joNDoty ( 774185 ) on Thursday August 18, 2005 @03:14PM (#13350013)
    I'll never be able to cut the cord as long as latency for wireless is so high.
    • I just wonder how, asside from defcon, they expect to get that many simultaneous wireless users within range.
      • I guess this wireless router would be good if there was a contest going on for how many people you can stuff inside a phone booth(with several teams competing), all with wireless devices.

      • www.assembly.org

        had thousands of potential wlan users in the area.

        Tho I think most still used normal LAN, simply because the wlan access points they had there were all still 11Mbps for historic reasons (several year old APs)
    • Amen. Keeping the cord to keep my Still, this is a good development - for non-gamers, it's good enough. Plus, this will provide competetition to said DSL and cable companies, which keeps prices low.

      • Re:cut the cord? (Score:4, Funny)

        by DjMd ( 541962 ) on Thursday August 18, 2005 @03:59PM (#13350377) Journal
        yes low prices....

        Priced at $12,000, the XS-3900 is a relatively affordable solution for locations that require high-density networks.

        Hrmmm 12k, yeah I can spare that I just broke a 50k bill buying my coffee.... in the year 2050.
        shoot there was supposed to be a lighting shift and music when I said that.. I don't know your primative HTML very well.
        Nice cheap gas you have here tho...

        • OK, you might not buy one of these, but an ISP certainly could...

          1000 users x $20 a month = this thing is profitable in roughly three weeks.

          2050, eh? Too bad you didn't say 3001 - I'd tell you to say hi to Bender for me.

          • I think you might, just maybe, be ignoring some other costs. Lets consider:

            -Actual Bandwidth costs (this is just an AP)
            -Installation Costs
            -Configuration Costs
            -Wages & Salary for all your people
            OR
            -outsourced tech + billing support costs

            Even that alone, you really think its easy to get 1000 people signed up within 3 weeks? That would be lovely, and highly unlikely, especially given the likely range of this thing. You would have to be in tokyo or china to get that type of density.

            Oh well. Still ki
        • "Nice gas you have here tho..."

      • Maybe a college campus would be the ideal location for one of these?
    • I got tired of the poor range from my SMC 802.11g router, so I wired my whole house with cat5e. I have 12 jacks throughout the house. The whole thing cost me around $350.

    • Re:cut the cord? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by TheRaven64 ( 641858 )
      Latency. Right. The average ping time between me an a machine on the other side of a wireless access point is 1.4ms. The ping time between me and the nearest machine on the other side of my cable modem is a goo 10 times that. Human reaction times are at least 200ms (with 3-400 being more common). What on earth do you do that an extra 1.4ms is intolerable?

      • Re:cut the cord? (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Afrosheen ( 42464 )
        Your latency is good because 1. you're close to the AP and have a good signal and 2. there aren't too many devices using it.

        Now, let's take a look at the corporate world outside of your parent's basement where commercial wireless applications are found.

        When you start adding alot of wireless clients, you end up with, as the grandparent mentioned, high latency. Notice how there aren't too many wireless VOIP routers on the market (that are unwired)? Not too many wireless handsets that work with

    • Re:cut the cord? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by gl4ss ( 559668 )
      I think you're mixing up gprs and wifi connections..

      or just fishing.

      How much latency does your wifi network then have? how many ms?
  • Parking lots will be overflowing with war drivers...

  • Cut the Cord? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by dsginter ( 104154 ) on Thursday August 18, 2005 @03:14PM (#13350016)
    Yeah right... until we can get 10-12 hours out of a laptop battery, we'll all have a cord. Might as well be a network cord with POE.

  • Lan Party? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by rwven ( 663186 ) on Thursday August 18, 2005 @03:16PM (#13350039)
    Sounds like a nice solution to save the pain in the butt of setting up large lan gaming events like the CPL... If a company can come up with a "gaming version" of this idea that "guarantees" lower latency and such i bet a lot of places will start adopting it... The only cords you'd have would be power cords... i like.
    • low latency + radio == ... no.

      If you want a good lan party invest in a 16x gig-e switch or something [they're not expensive] and get proper gig-e cards in your computers [or if you have on board all the better].

      That'll get you low-latency high bandwidth networking for cheap.

      Tom
      • Well, I use a wireless router at my house and i regularly get pings of under 20 on gaming servers... Low latency is quite possible... as far as expense goes, i'm more talking about "pain in the butt" of setting up a wired lan... There's nothing easy about setting up a lan party for 200+ people...
    • Yeah it'd work great, until somebody microwaves a pizza pop (entirely feasible, this is a LAN Party we're talking about) and everyone's pings jump to four digits. :)
      • I dunno why everyone always says this. My microwave, which is maybe 20 feet from the access point, does not affect the signal strength, latency, or data speed in the slightest even when my laptop has direct line of sight with the microwave (but not with the AP). And yes, I'm talking about when it's running.

        Maybe old or poorly shielded microwaves cause a problem, but mine which is fairly new has never caused a problem.
    • I think applications like LAN parties are the only real application of this. It'd be great for any sort of conference, state fair, or similar large, high density, public gathering. Sure, maybe it's not the best solution for a 128 player FPS, but it's good enough to serve a large DEFCON conference room, or the like.

      In any more permanent situation, cat5 will probably work a lot more satisfactorily.
      • Yeah, for permanence i agree... If there's one think that tops the list of unreliability, it's wireless. I've honestly never seen a wireless connection that "always" worked. Don't know what it is, but for permanent things wired just seems to work better. Or at least permanent things that matter...

  • I love the math they did to come up with this... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Samurai Cat! ( 15315 ) on Thursday August 18, 2005 @03:17PM (#13350042) Homepage
    "Priced at $12,000, the XS-3900 is a relatively affordable solution for locations that require high-density networks. With all functions in a single device, administrators could see significant cost savings for deployment because multiple power and Ethernet outlets are not needed."

    So the savings on 11 ethernet jacks and power sockets are worth a $12,000 price tag? :/

  • $12,000??? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Duncan3 ( 10537 ) on Thursday August 18, 2005 @03:17PM (#13350046) Homepage
    At that price, it's FAR cheaper to just buy the 16 devices and a router. But it does look cool.

    Not to mention you can microwave your coffee by just setting it on top of the thing ;)

    • Re:$12,000??? (Score:2, Funny)

      by hode ( 771261 )
      Xirrus business plan:

      1. Stuff 16 integrated access points into a smoke detector case

      2. ???

      3. Profit!

      Thank you. I'm here all week.

  • It seems kind of antisocial.. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Improv ( 2467 ) <pgunn01@gmail.com> on Thursday August 18, 2005 @03:18PM (#13350056) Homepage Journal
    I hope people are careful where they use it -- using all the channels at the same time seems quite antisocial to any other networks that might be in the area.
    • I agree. This is one of the problems with some of the proposed "WiFi n" standards - they take twice the bandwidth, meaning they take 2/3rds of the available band. With other proposed "n" standards, they stick to the same b/g bandwidth.

      There simply aren't enough non-overlapping channels to accommodate this sort of use. Some people might point out that there are up to 14 channels available, but the problem is that the channels are spaced 5MHz apart and WiFi b/g takes 30MHz to communicate, stomping out the

  • Wrong limiting factor... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by pla ( 258480 ) on Thursday August 18, 2005 @03:18PM (#13350059) Journal
    Finally enough bandwidth for us all to cut the cord?

    Multi-channel 802.11a has plenty of bandwidth to cut the cord. Even plain ol' 802.11g would suffice.

    However, only one question really matters, and I doubt a positive answer:

    Can it give me a decent signal more than one room away from the AP?
    • My limiting factor is the number of 2.4GHz wireless phones nearby.
    • Can it give me a decent signal more than one room away from the AP?

      Maybe you could buy better equipment? With both Buffalo and Linksys equipment, I can manage a stable connection at 100+ ft through two walls and a ceiling. That is with typical 30mW devices, I get better distance with Engenius / Senao 200mW devices.
    • Can it give me a decent signal more than one room away from the AP?

      Depends if you are in a steel frame building or not.... if only modern architects would think of the geeks.

  • Location (Score:3, Insightful)

    by kevin_conaway ( 585204 ) on Thursday August 18, 2005 @03:18PM (#13350061) Homepage
    Sure they get a lot of bandwidth out of this thing, but don't they essentially get the same coverage they would with one AP?

    For a large size area, the benefit to having multiple APs is that you can spread them out to increase your coverage.

    • Re:Location (Score:3, Informative)

      by hattig ( 47930 )
      They are all directional. In the 16 channel version, the 802.11a channels are directed at 30 degrees to the previous one, and each has a 60 degree spread. That should extend the range a bit - even if the diameter of the total covered area only doubled over using a single AP with an undirected antenna, that is still 4x the area covered. If the diameter of the wireless range was 3x larger, that is 9x the area covered. 4x - 16x more area.

      Anyone here know what range increase is more likely with a solution like

  • Emancipation (Score:4, Funny)

    by Stanistani ( 808333 ) on Thursday August 18, 2005 @03:18PM (#13350062) Homepage Journal
    >Finally enough bandwidth for us all to cut the cord?"

    *Yells down to basement*
    Kurt! You're moving OUT today!

  • Silly gimmicks (Score:4, Insightful)

    by sexyrexy ( 793497 ) on Thursday August 18, 2005 @03:21PM (#13350089)
    Such gimmicky devices never take off. They proport to be some groundbreaking new amazingness when in actuality it's "a bunch of WiFi transceivers stacked on top of each other". That's not new, and it's not amazing. Companies have for years sold network cards that work by load-balancing traffic across multiple CAT5 lines - a good idea, sure, but it's never going to be widely accepted. How many double-100baseT NICs do you have? If you needed more than 100mbps, you'd buy gigabit ethernet. People who need more wireless speed are going to wait for the next step in technology, not a bunch of the same thing duct-taped together and put in a shiny plastic case.
    • Ahh, but this will work because we all want more wireless bandwidth.

      Hmm, now I just have to calculate how much battery life I can get out of my laptop now that I have 16 wireless cards bonded togeather on it. I don't think it's going to last too long with all of t...

      <*NO CARRIER*>

  • Am I the only... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by MightyMait ( 787428 ) on Thursday August 18, 2005 @03:22PM (#13350096) Journal
    Am I the only EE (by training if not practice--I do software for a living) around that's a little concerned about the long-term effects of all this (additional--we've been absorbing UHF/VHF for 60+ years now) microwave radiation? Sure, sure, inverse-square law, skin effect, yadda yadda. I can't help but think we biological beings are much more sensitive to EMFs than the biologists assume. Could there possibly be a correlation between increased EMFs and the increase in autism, cancer, etc.? I haven't seen the actual research/figures, but I'm told that, when flourescent lights (with the older, dirtier ballasts) were introduced in the 50's, that learning disabilities skyrocketed (yeah, perhaps diagnostics just got better).

    • Why be concerned? My understanding (limited at best, I admit) of Darwinism says that occasionally, a random mutation turns out to be beneficial and the offspring of said mutation are better able to survive than "normals". Maybe, instead of being the bane of humanity, this $12,000 wienie roaster will enable us to evolve into something much better!

      Let me be the first to welcome our new three-armed overlords!

    • Could there possibly be a correlation between increased EMFs and the increase in autism, cancer, etc.?

      Maybe, but why don't we look to something a bit more obvious for the cause of these things. Like diet for example. Sugar intake in the last 100 years has increased from about 4 lbs to 160 lbs per person per year in the US. Plus we eat foods covered with pesticides and herbicides, pumped with preservatives and hormones, and bleached and refined until nothing of any nutritious value is left. All this has

      • Re:Am I the only... (Score:3, Informative)

        by LWATCDR ( 28044 )
        "More cancer, more diabetes, and God knows what other diseases can be linked to the kind of diet we eat these days."
        Actually Type II diabetes is NOT caused by eating too much sugar.
        You have the gene or you don't. Being over weight can make it worse or even push you over the line into being diabetic. Yes I have do have type II. Some people can eat sugar all freaking day long and never get it. I was a vegetarian for 3 years and had lost 35 lbs and still got it.
        Their is another reason why diabetes is they have

    • Am I the only EE ... that's a little concerned about the long-term effects of ... microwave radiation?

      No, you're not.

      There may be some correlation but the reality is that lab tests are largely indicating that there is no measurable effect, and the transceivers (cell phones, bluetooth, wireless networks, etc) have been around for so little time that it's not going to be easy to determine the correlation, nevermind causation.

      We'll know more in 10-20 years. My guess is that it would take a very h
    • Could there possibly be a correlation between increased EMFs and the increase in autism, cancer, etc.?

      Autism has been linked pretty conclusively with mercury in vaccinations [boston.com]

    • Everybody vs. fluorescent lamps is too large of a sample set with too many unknowns to draw a good conclusion from. There are a lot of things that were popularized over the same period of time that are also now known carcinogens (mass-produced cigarettes, plastics that leach toxins, pesticides, radium painted watch dials, and more). Interestingly enough, the old, dirty ballasts you mention were not only electromagnetically dirty, but they were often filled with PCBs as many transformers were during the ti
    • That just means thats increased revenue for those who are developing products to cure cancer, autism, etc. You're creating new jobs and creating revenue! Or so my capitalist overlords tell me.

  • Here's why I won't use wireless (Score:5, Funny)

    by BuBu_ ( 72690 ) on Thursday August 18, 2005 @03:24PM (#13350121)
    Okay, now this is going to sound incredibly stupid to the vast majority of you, it'll probably start a flame war and all of that good stuff.

    The reason I won't use wireless is pretty simple, suppose I have my computer and my WAP sitting in the front room of my house. If you decide to pull up and park across the street you can sniff my data rather easily. Sure I can encrypt it, secure it, and slap an ACL on there so you can't get in or do anything with the data you capture, but the fact of the matter is you and your buddies hanging out in your car across the street from my house can sniff my data.

    Now, if I've got copper inside. I pull up to the house one night and I notice the front window is open and there is some cat5 ran across my yard from your car window to my switch. I'm going to come out of the house, go to your car and proceed to knock the ever loving shit out of you in front of your friends. I'm not a big man, but if I was in that situation, I would be an angry one.

    Of course, sure you can sniff my data with copper, but most likely you won't be doing it parked in front of my house, but rather at your own house which settles the whole notion of me dragging you out through your car window and kicking your ass there in the street.
    • Given the level of encryption associated with things like WAP, people would have an easier time trying to get you to install a trojan or the like through email and sniffing your data that way.

    • Re:Here's why I won't use wireless (Score:5, Funny)

      by revery ( 456516 ) <charles@NoSpam.cac2.net> on Thursday August 18, 2005 @03:44PM (#13350264) Homepage

      Of course, sure you can sniff my data with copper, but most likely you won't be doing it parked in front of my house, but rather at your own house which settles the whole notion of me dragging you out through your car window and kicking your ass there in the street.

      This is how one man came to realize that the thing that actually ticked him off, was not packet sniffing, but curbside parking...

      And that children, concludes our Fairy Tale.

    • > Now, if I've got copper inside. I pull up to the house one night and I notice the front window is open and there is some cat5 ran across my yard from your car window to my switch.

      Until they introduce, small 6 inch long sniffer gumstix which filter a lot and send the results hourly to the hacker from inside your firewall (DCHP .. the works btw).

      I've actually seen such a device in action - it works very well. It's very easily put in place to look like a blanker (I saw it 2 years ago) for a networ

  • What's the actual final performance for n=1 to 1000 users.
    I'm 10' from an Airport (b+g), all bars on, lone user, and still usually just turn it off in favor of the Cat5 lying on my desk.
    The 3Meg cable we use is underdriving everything - wired and wireless - but there's still a difference.
    At a hotspot, checking my mail or surfing it isn't an issue - but at work connecting to servers etc. it's a palpable difference. Maybe we get spoiled like our ears with a stereo, but unless the actual experience matches ca

  • Neat (Score:5, Informative)

    by Cytlid ( 95255 ) * on Thursday August 18, 2005 @03:31PM (#13350166)
    This is really a good idea. From TFA: ...permit only a single concurrent station to connect to each IAP...

    It's a wireless *switch*! Typical wireless deployments are like a hub-- 10, 20, 50 people connecting to the same AP. This is a really cool idea when you think about it. You're bridged solely to your own integrated access point, much like a port is your part on the bridge of a switch.

    I say, get 12 WRT54G's at $60/piece, and a used/refurbed Cisco 2912, for about $200, load up the WRTs with OpenWRT, and you could probably do the a similar thing for about $1000. A little configuration and tweaking might be necessary though.

    Also, don't know about the overlapping channels thing ... that might be a challenge. Like I said, similar, but not identical. Still a neat idea.

    • Neatness (Score:3, Funny)

      by hummassa ( 157160 )
      I say, get 12 WRT54G's at $60/piece, and a used/refurbed Cisco 2912, for about $200, load up the WRTs with OpenWRT, and you could probably do the a similar thing for about $1000. A little configuration and tweaking might be necessary though.

      Yeah, a little configuration and approx. 20-50m (30-60yards) of cable :-)
  • I don't know how these are implemented, but this sounds like an ideal application for a software radio. you just need one wideband antenna/transmitter and solve all channel splits in software. You 'only' need a few Mbs in A/D conversion(upper channel freq minus lowest channel freq) and a dedicated proc that can handle all that data on the fly.

    It's way overpriced but i like this bit:

    We managed the XS-3900 via the Web-based GUI and the command line, which is available via SSH (Secure Shell) or console cable

    f

  • Okay, but... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Cyn ( 50070 ) <cyn.cyn@org> on Thursday August 18, 2005 @03:44PM (#13350260) Homepage
    Does it also function as a smoke detector?

    Is it sufficiently tamper-resistant to not break when someone tries to check the battery?

  • And How? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by doombob ( 717921 ) on Thursday August 18, 2005 @03:57PM (#13350364) Homepage
    How is my company supposed to be able to afford the equivalent of a couple hundred T1s (ok, hyperbole) underneath this uber hot spot to handle all these users? Can't wait till one of our customers calls us this week and asks us to give him 800Mbits up and down. We already have to filter all spam perfectly without deleting a single one of their legitimate e-mails, and well as ensure they never get a virus or any spyware. Evar.
    • don't assume every network connection is internet-bound. Most traffic is intranet.

      Besides, someone that pays $12,000 for a wireless switch device probably already has 1Gb fiber.

  • didn't cringely do something like this... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by enrico_suave ( 179651 ) on Thursday August 18, 2005 @03:58PM (#13350370) Homepage
    ah here's the link [pbs.org] he "mesh'd" 3 or 4 open AP's to be one fat connection.

    *shrug*
  • This thing is $12,000 - so it's obviously targeted as businesses. Now, imagine a cluster of employees tightly packed enough to justify 16 WAPs from one physical location. First off, the cheapest solution is to simply wire everyone up. 16 hubs, a switch and the required cabling and labor costs a lot less than $12,000. Even if they need wireless, why not just buy 16 wireless hubs at $60 a pop, and then hook those up to a switch? I don't get it why anyone would buy this...
  • I saw pretty much this exact same thing about six months ago. It was made by Vivato (a couple of Vivato people, being a local company, had come to one of my CS seminar classes). And it had been around for a couple of years by that time.

    Not sure if they have an 802.11g version out yet. The one I saw (and touched!) was an 802.11b version with some nifty directional (phased?) antenna array stuff, using multiple Agere PHYs and an embedded PPC CPU running Linux to control the whole thing.

    Several of the one
  • Umm...802.11 specs only define 11 (for g, 14 for b if I'm reading my stuff correctly) channels. That means a couple of these radio's will be running on the same channels, which is about as pointless as you can get. Also running two APs on channel 4 and 5 next to each other will cause lots of interference with each other. So basically this thing will just be spewing lots of radio interference destorying the throughput on any single channel.

  • What's the big deal? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Brandybuck ( 704397 ) on Thursday August 18, 2005 @04:11PM (#13350469) Homepage Journal
    What's the big deal about "cutting the cord"? Everyone's acting like this is the Holy Grail or something, but as near as I can tell, I'll still be sitting in front of the same old cubicle using the same old workstation, so what's so Evil(tm) about the "cord"?

  • You get 4 a/b/g APs, plus 12 a-only APs in their can. That's where they get the big # of users. For a total of 16 APs, this is a great device for high-density, conference room or public lobby applications. And the retail is more like $14K.

    Oh yeah, telnet works on it unless disabled, too.

  • Hands on (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Jameson192 ( 908649 ) on Thursday August 18, 2005 @04:38PM (#13350678)
    I actually had the chance to play around with this device while doing a review for Network Computing (http://www.nwc.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=16 5701557 [nwc.com]).

    It's actually quite big compared to a normal AP but looks like nothing more than an oversized smoke detector when setup.

    The term wireless switch may be misleading, more than one laptop can connect to each IAP and the wireless link is still a shared medium.

    Where this product differs is it's ability to use all of the unlicensed spectrum within a given area. This translates into 3 channels on 802.11b/g and 12 channels on 802.11a. The range for 802.11b/g was about average but for 802.11a it was great. This is because each IAP has it's own antenna pointing in a specific direction (70 degrees wide) which allows the signal to be amplified by 7dbi rather than the normal 2.2dbi for an omnidirectional. This translates in the transmitted power being roughly doubled.

    Some people say they could "emulate" the devices result using a bunch of WRT54Gs but since those operate in 2.4GHz they would all overlap and cause massive interference problems. The only effective way to get massive amounts of wireless bandwidth within a given area is using 5GHz because there are more non-overlapping channels (12 vs 3).

    Another cool feature with the product is the lights on the front of the array. There is one for each IAP and they light up when someone associates to that IAP.

  • 800 Mbps? Riiiiiiight... (Score:3, Informative)

    by Cthefuture ( 665326 ) on Thursday August 18, 2005 @04:42PM (#13350718)
    Not only would you be obliterating all other wireless networks within range (this thing is active on all the channels) and getting collisions slowing it, but there is no way in hell you are going to be getting the advertised 54 Mbps on each channel.

    Now I have never used the 54 Mbps stuff but from my experience with the 11 and 22 Mbps equipment I can say that you get no where near that speed even with the antennas nearly touching each other. My 22 Mbps network gets around 6 Mbps in actual use, I have never seen it go above that. And when I was on 11 Mbps it literally topped out at exactly half that speed (3 Mbps). It seems like we have all been duped.
  • Could you wrap a pringles can, or such, around each antenna, so that each covers a different direction, thereby increasing the range?
  • That would be 12833.76!

    (802.11 x 16) just to show my work.
  • I just happen to have finished building an FPGA based system [daltons.info] which can handle multiple WiFi channels. (5 channels per board, number of boards only limited by how many PCI slots available.) Anyone interested in it?

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