Follow Slashdot blog updates by subscribing to our blog RSS feed

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Technology

5 GHz Wireless Networking With CMOS Transceivers 76

Posted by timothy from the that's-not-a-wireless-transciever dept.
cthugha writes: "On the back of IPv6 and fat pipes, we Aussies have been at it again. Radiata, a company set up by a couple of Sydney-based researchers, has achieved wireless networking for LANs in the 5 GHz band using CMOS-based transceivers. This means (i) low power consumption, (ii) high bandwidth (currently, 54 Mbps with a view to getting up to 100 Mbps) and (iii) low cost. Unfortunately, like most Australian inventions, this one has only found serious commercial backing overseas, specifically from Cisco (government/big business over here has no brain)." Products, please? For half a billion dollars' investment, I hope Cisco plans to start selling some toys, fast.
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

5 GHz Wireless Networking With CMOS Transceivers More

5 GHz Wireless Networking With CMOS Transceivers

Comments Filter:
  • This really interests me and I was wondering how far they are expected to allow you to transmit for consumers? If I can do 15 kilometers with these things at a half decent price, I can see a very large market...

  • Re:Cloud, point-to-point, or both ? (Score:4)

    by Kibo ( 256105 ) <naw#gm a i l .com> on Sunday November 19, 2000 @04:34AM (#614812) Homepage
    At 5GHz it's still low microwave. Which means most everything will screw with it. You'd get more speed with less humidity etc. It wouldn't be limited to line of sight, but the less you have in the way the better. Others asked if it would be IEEE 802.11 compliant, it will (check their PDFs or white sheets).

    Radiata Product Briefs [radiata.com]

    At 5GHz, and certainly with low power, they'll probably be local to an area of a few hundred feet. But it also depends on how wide a spectum they need. (I think the FCC is auctioning a band near 5GHz.) I'm getting my guess of a few hundred feet from assuming they'll use frequency hopping spread spectrum techniques similar as to what's available now.

    For a look at the US spectum allocation, as it was in 1999 at least, check this.

    US FCC Spectrum allocation as of 1999. [ufl.edu]

    Still 54Mb at duplex isn't bad. 11Mb or 44Mb and somtimes 54Mb?

    But since they use (2) bands at 20MHz they're gonna need a Jeff Bezos ego sized chunk of spectrum to make it fly. To make it worse for both Cisco and their young(er) charge every damn countries spectrum is chopped up seperately, and they're getting kinda crowded. Given that the spectrum these puppies go at is an, as of yet, unallocated and (to my mind) a nessecarily large, block, I've gotta say these are at least 2 or more years off from the consumer.

    There are a couple of up sides, these toys are really low power, they'll have very small antenna, and by the time you can get one you'll be playing 3d interactive web games off your G3 phone and won't give a crap.

  • >(preparatory to the government demolishing the >school at the end of the year -- nice one, >Richard).

    Well this is the kind of pain you should expect when you've got a Dick Court.

    (For non West Australians Richard Court is the current W.A. Premier.)
  • Fixed US FCC Spectrum link.

    http://ftp.nerdc.ufl.edu/~tiapr o/w ire/Image1.gif [ufl.edu]

    Sorry.

  • Saw it on TV... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    ("Nightline" on Channel 9) about 2 weeks ago. They demonstrated it between 2 (Linux/BSD?) boxes running KDE - each box playing a movie stored on the other computer. They were about 10M away from each other.

    I was impressed.
  • Why don't you just get a wireless 802.11b card then? We were playing with some Xircom cards at a conference and they work pretty well. Only problems that start arising is when there are more than about 25-30 people accessing an access point at once (I guess it really IS the limit), all hell breaks lose and ping times shoot up to 850 ms and you get about 85% packet loss. You can get one of these cards for about $160-$170 on the web. Plug and play with Win2k. Stuck the card in my laptop, stuck in the cd for it to copy the drivers, rebooted and was synced up to the Cisco access point without changing anything.

    I would've tried the Linux WLAN support with my older ZoomAir 802.11 card (Harris Prism chipset) but I can never connect to the ftp site where the drivers are to download them. Actually, I guess now they have it working via http so I'll have to give that a shot at home. Maybe then I can replace Win98 on my adhoc based 802.11 access point I built painfully out of a P5-90 with 16 megs of ram with Linux. Though, oddly enough I get decent performance out of Win98 as an accesspoint if you turn ip forwarding on and don't have the box doing ANYTHING else. :-)

  • You can run fiber to your ISP and get 1-10Gb/sec as well. Unfortunately you're going to face the same problem as you would with this wireless service. Somewhere, your ISP is going to have to connect its fat pipes into someone else's fat pipes. Unless they're peering they're going to pay a fat fee and pass it back to you. The Internet is no longer free. :-)
  • The fact that microwaves operate at 2.45 Ghz is, I believe, the reason that the 2.4 Ghz ISM band exists in the first place. The band that is now used for a lot of htings, including wireless LAN stuff.

    Ah! look out! yer gonna walk into the wicrowave LAN!

  • So you've never seen a picture of the Sydney Opera house with the harbour in the background in your life? .. maybe you just thought it was an oasis.
  • IIRC, while parts of the 5 GHz band are still being auctioned off, there is already a portion of the spectrum that is reserved for unlicensed communications of the same category as 2.4 GHz WLANs/phones, etc. (The regs are linked to from one of the WLAN HOWTOS, I believe, can't remember exactly where.)
  • gah, yet again a submission is ignored, and then as soon as someone else who seems to be a semi regular submitter comes and submits it, it's published, it's happened a few times already, around twice to me if i remember correctly.

    But yeah, cool idea for wireless networking. I wonder if it'd ever make someones head go *POP*
    --
  • Yess...yet another ultra-high-frequency wireless technology beaming even more microwaves through your brain. Go brain cancer.... Truly morons will never learn...
  • My company regularly employes 5.x, UNI-II, 100MB links all thime time; how is this new? Any schmuck can buy the whole kit from Tessco. Now if this "new technology" is far cheaper, then hurrah! Otherwise, I've got a story about a new coherent light source called a "LASER"....

    "The light that shines brightest probably isn't you"
  • That should have been 100Mb/sec....sorry
  • The reason your lan doesn't boil your brains is elementary.

    802.11b network card: 0.1W (100mW), open air. Power decreases as inverse square of distance from transmitter.

    Microwave Oven: 600W. Contained in a microwave reflecting chamber so all radiation is absorbed by molecules in the food.

  • I'm running Win95A with DUN1.3 on a 386SX/33 with 4MB RAM and a 120MB HD as an access point. Doesn't even take that long to boot--it's amazing how lean Win95A was by today's standards. And it's even more amazing how few people know about its secret routing capabilities; I've never met anyone in the flesh that knew, only on the net. It works with 4MB because it doesn't really do much while routing; once you actually try to bring up apps and use them, you quickly notice what hardware you're on.

  • Re:Um, old news? (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Erm... just to clarify a few points in your post...

    UHF or VHF were just the frequencies that the streaming content was transmitted upon. The actual protocol used was a rather primitive compressed format termed NTSC (short for Never Twice the Same Colour, in reference to it's complete lack of any mechanism for correcting common colour errors caused by phase distortion in the transmitted signal). While the low latency and compression of the format were technically superior, NTSC has basically no error-correction facilities, an essential part of modern streaming formats.

    Side note: NTSC and it's competitor PAL had the capability to transmit mono and colour content in the same signal. Not bad, eh!
  • Dunno, but Lucent cards have a 'microwave oven supression' feature built in to them.

    Anyone know what sort of spectrum a microwave brain toaster puts out? You would think regulations would keep it pretty narrowband for just this reason.

    Heh, the popcorn thing reminds me of a darwin award contender :-)

    .flip.

  • I _dare_ you to use the word 'milliard' wherever you see 10^9.
    If you look at a lot of European languages, the native word for 10^9 is of the same root as the English 'milliard', so there are hundreds of millions of people who ought to understand you. If they don't, tell them to look it up in a dictionary - you've done them a favour, you've educated them.

    Planks may think you're an arsehole for using the word, but in my case that's probably true, so I don't care :-)

    FatPhil

  • I love to see Science Fiction coming true.

    In Earth, by David Brin, there's a global network of computers, and the interface to it generally consists of a giant screen: entire sections of the wall can be used as a display. On that display, users interact with the 'net...

    So this would be, what, local-area bandwidth, at least? Now all we need is for the displays to get cheaper. (that'll take at least 10 years, probably...)

    However, this is all well before, what, 2040? Keep up the good work, Mr. Brin!
    ---
    pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate [ncsu.edu].

  • http://www.hiperlan2.com/web/ [hiperlan2.com]

    Answers most of the questions you may have, check the FAQ.

    --

  • US Frequency Allocation Chart [doc.gov]

    That has a much clearer picture of what's up in the 5ghz range - Aircraft Navigation being the primary use, with bits of Maratime Nav and a little slice of "Amateur" in there near 5.8ghz.

    I'd be most worried about the line of sight issue. The higher your frequency, you can send more data, but more things are going to block your signal. Something operating at this frequency is going to have problems going through a wall or a pane of glass. It might work ok through a wood frame/drywall construction house's interior walls, but I suspect that if you've got steel frame or even lath & plaster with hardware cloth backing, you're not going to get very far, or get very good performance if you do.
  • Since when was Cisco associated with cheap products? This thing will cost a lot of money.
  • An interesting thing about this radio technology is that the baseband encoding (about 100MHz in width) is all done in software. Neat.
  • No wonder we are known as the smart country. I was surprised to see so many Aussies on /. This is a great invention up there with Panno, lawn mower and Wine Casks. Aussie Aussie Aussie Oi oi oi. Sorry still fired up from the olympics!
  • Not much will screw it up, in comparison with 2.4GHz products, such as the current range of wavelans or bluetooth.

    Firstly, at 2.4GHz there is a lot of stuff as the band is unlicensed. Microwave ovens emit in the same band. So there is a high probability of interference with any of the 2.4GHz products, that will only get worse as BlueTooth starts to be accepted. In comparison the 5GHz bands are licensed for use with WLAN products, with similar bands licensed worldwide. This basically means that the 5GHz products have to play fair with each other.

    Secondly, there is a lot of bandwidth available at 5GHz, especially in the US and Europe (Japanese have a lot less), for WLAN applications. Given that the amount of data you can carry is pretty much proportional to your bandwidth (ignoring noise for the moment) this gives potentially enormous resources. For instance the American natioanl infrastructure bands are 5.15GHz to 5.35GHz and 5.725 to 5.825GHz, giving a total of 12x20MHz channels each capable of 54Mb/s. In Europe you have 19x20MHz bands. All of this bandwidth is liscensed NOW worldwide for this style of product.

    Then you have to consider the type of coding used on these 5GHz systems. They are all OFDM.. Effectively, this means that those 20MHz bands are split up in 64 seperate channel (some used for guardbands) and each of the 64 channels is modulated seperately. So all those horrible indoor propagation effects that cause channel fading are less importance. In a traditional single carrier system multipath can kill the channel, but with OFDM you lose a couple of channels which are then recovered with error correction

    All in all, I'd prefer one of these 5GHz systems over anything in the 2.4GHz band.

    D.

  • This is not point-to-point systems. They are all design with indoor propagation in mind. The range depends much on the envirnoment in which the system is used (i.e American offices don't have the same construction as Japanese ones), on the speed you are trying to use, the transmit power used and on the error rate you are willing to accept. The standard acceptable error rate with these 5GHz systems is 1 in 10 packets lost. This represents a bit error rate much smaller than this (1e-3 approximately).

    At the lowest transmit rate of 6Mb/s with this system you should be a cell size quite large (50 to 100m). But at the maximum rate of 54Mb/s that cell size will drop to 10 or 20m. These numbers are for a standard office envirnoment, with a high transmit power.

  • there are loopholes ie cb freq see www.consume.net [consume.net] for details!
  • They forgot to mention (iv)Lack of ability to penetrate through objects.
    As you get higher in RF bandwidth, you lose the ability for the RF waves to penetrate objects (walls, furniture, etc). So, while we will (theoretically) get higher bandwidth, we will also sacrifice distance when compared to similar power consumption levels over lower-bandwidth technologies.
  • I would imagine that they would be using direct sequence instead of frequency hopping because it supports higher bandwidths. FYI the 802.11 standard uses frequency hopping with the fastest radios @ 3mb (BreezeCom Pro.11 series [breezecom.com] I believe). The 802.11b standard uses direct sequence which is 11mb.

    Most people will use the 802.11b standard because it is faster, however in some cases 802.11 is desirable because it can support more users without frequency overlap.

    Western Multiplex has some cool toys too. [wmux.com]

  • Not that well in my humble opinion.
  • This wireless networking just gets better and better... I still have a cell modem i my laptop, and it's truly painful to use, especially sitting at my school (UU) library, which has wireless ethernet. But for many of us /.ers, the deciding factor with these new technologies is whether they become standardized. 802.11 was the greatest thing that happened to wireless ethernet; if we really want an idea like this to take off, it has to be standardized and widespread from the minute they get the first product out the door. With that said, let's start seeing those products!
  • Frighteningly, the Australians seemed to have created a very promising piece of technology. Fortunately for us Americans, Cisco has already made moves to purchase the company.

    Hate to see you guys get out of control down there...

  • Um, old news? (Score:5)

    by Frymaster ( 171343 ) on Saturday November 18, 2000 @10:24PM (#614844) Homepage Journal
    You could have a plasma screen on your wall running four or five television channels simultaneously, and you could take the screen off the wall and walk around with it.

    My parents had a TV in the 60's that worked on similar technology... apparently the image and sound were streamed to the this video-on-demand appliance using a protocol called UHF (or it's competitor VHF). In the same vein, I must note the my grandfather in fact built his own wireless audio streaming appliance back in the 30's! In fact, the appliance was called a "wireless" and was based on an Amplitude Modulation protocol called, simply, AM.

    Isn't progress amazing?

  • its still vaporware. Granted they have some big name companies looking at it, but by the time they get some products out, Bluetooth will be in full force here in the states. I'm sure someone is already on a faster version of Bluetooth. Maybe they can get some products out in a timely manor with Linux support.
  • I've been using a 28k-36k connection 'till a couple of months, now a have an adsl (fsking dana - antwerp,belguim inside joke) connection, still pretty expensive.

    But I wouldn't mind another serious investment for getting 100mbit/s wireless access. Of course only if there is some big-ball isp behind it

    Local peer to peer filesharing anyone?

    Time to get my painkillers, get awake, and re-read the article...
  • If I run my microwave will my home LAN be disrupted? For that matter, can I use these thingers to make popcorn? Has anyone done a cost evaluation on making popcorn using my NIC instead of getting up to use the microwave? I'm just curious because running the microwave always interfered with my 2.4 GHz wavcoms.
  • I got the info from gdict
  • I don't know about the rest of it, but the appliance is unlikely to be "widespread from the minute they get the first product out the door."

    Just a thought.

  • Let's face it (Score:3)

    by GC ( 19160 ) on Sunday November 19, 2000 @02:16AM (#614850)
    If the Australian Government did Invest in the Technology, Cisco would then buy Austrialia.

    :^>

    -
  • HiperLAN2 and Bluetooth operate in different application areas and therefore complement each other. Bluetooth offers approximately 1 Mbit/s data rate in the 2.4 GHz band and is mainly intended as a cable replacement technology to connect peripheral devices to mobile phones and PCs in the Personal Area Network (10m), whereas HiperLAN2 is a more cable replacement technology for Local Area Networks (100m) supporting speeds up to approximately 54 Mbit/s in the 5 GHz band. As they are not in the same frequency band there are none of the interference issues that threaten other Wireless LAN technologies operating in the same band as Bluetooth (2.4Ghz)

    --

  • I guess investing in the technology would be another way to make sure it doesn't compete with their drinking buddies' digital TV networks.
    --
    Never try to teach a pig to sing. It wastes your time and annoys the pig.
  • Yeah, but if the point of his novel comes true, that being a monster black hole lodging itself in the center of the earth, I'm gonna be pissed>/i>.
  • Yep, it was a great game:)

    python -c "print __import__('base64').decodestring('bWFyay5icmFkYnV yeUBudHUuZWR1LmF1')"
  • > 500 Million dollars (Australian) which converts to aproximently 259,550,000 American dollars

    Please pay no importance to the terrible exchange rate. Australia's economy is up to crap right now, and you Yanks are making the problem worse (the presidental election will decide the value of the Australian dollar!)

    Once upon a time, I could x1.5 when buying from America, and x2 when buying from the UK. Now I have to double for America and triple for UK! This is absolutely absurd!
    (vicious circle: if people stop trading, then the dollar isn't going to get better...)
    -----------
  • A U.S. company (see www.atheros.com) demonstrated working 802.11a radios at the most recent N+I show in Atlanta (Radiata chips were not showable at that time). Both companies use "standard" digital CMOS to create a two-chip 5 Ghz radio. One of the chips is all-digital and provides the DSP and OFDM modulation functions at baseband frequencies. The second chip is the 5-Ghz analog transceiver - which is the trickier bit. The main differences between these two chip sets are first: the RF power amp is incorporated into the Atheros design - it must be an external component in the Radiata design. For indoor use in the lower 5 Ghz bands this is a 50mw device. Doing this in cmos is even trickier than the transceiver design. Secondly, the Atheros pair of chips incorporate a full NIC/MAC design into the digital chip, meaning that it has pins to hook directly onto a PCI bus or a Cardbus. The Radiata chips must be accompanied by an external MAC/bus/dma device. The Radiata digital chip will interface to a standard Intersil MAC chip, which at this time, is not able to drive the radio at full rated bandwidth (54 Mhz). The Atheros cards have been demonstrated at 72 Mhz (using two radio channels in parallel rather than just one), and are expected to achive higher bandwidths (108Mhz) in production. Be wary of the difference between channel bandwidth and data troughput for this class of network. With ethernet and other wired LANs we're using to achieving data throughputs near the line rate. With radio protocols there is a great deal more wait time in the protocol. Current designs do well to achieve 50% of the channel. Note also that all these devices are half-duplex since it seems to be impractical to make a transceiver that can receive while transmitting (on the same channel). In the future it may very well be standard to build a chip that contains several radios operating on different channels in order to get both more bandwidth and full-duplex operation. But for now, it is not practical. There are several frequency bands at 5Ghz set aside for non-licensed operation. The low band specifies 50 mw power at most and is intended for indoor use. Higher power levels may be used in the upper bands - up to one watt in some cases. Because of its dependence on an external power amp, the Radiata chips are well-suited for use in point-to-point external links: imagine you're Cisco and you'd like to provide wireless links between routers. In contrast, the Atheros design is solidly focused on the low-power world of laptops and home/office applicatins. In the near future one might expect a next-gen Radiata design to resemble the Atheros design, and a next-gen Atheros design to have some of the properties of the Radiata design. Range: the range of these radios at 50mw indoors is dependent on many factors. They seem to be more robust than 802.11b - because of OFDM they are much less susceptible to multi-path interference. On the other hand the penetration through construction materials at 5 Ghz is much less than at 2.4 Ghz. Range seems to be 100-150 feet indoors - mileage will certainly vary. Signals seem to reach their destination by reflecting off walls rather than by penetration. Summary: the Radiata chip set is a two-chip radio. The Atheros design is a two-chip NIC card that incorporates a 5-Ghz radio: just add antenna and power. Taken as a whole, these two designs represent the state-of-the-art in integrated signal processing and radio design.
  • This technology has other advantages.

    For example, with all the eletromagnetic microwaving power pumped into thin air, you can cook your meal while you download an mp3 to your laptop!

  • It's a logical step... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    There has been talk of moving to the 5ghz range for some time now due to the problems surrounding the 2.4ghz range. Aparently, Bluetooth and 802.11 trash each others packets with Bluetooth modulating it's frequency some 60 times a second and 802.11 at a much lower number (2-5 I think?). What I would really like to see is 802.11 abandon the 2.4ghz range completely and adopt the the 5ghz range for higher bandwidth and longer distances. Nice to see someone is already on that track. I can only pray it doesn't fall into a propreitary mess. My $.02

  • Microwave Frequencies (Score:3)

    by mindstrm ( 20013 ) on Sunday November 19, 2000 @10:43AM (#614859)
    Microwave ovens operate at 2.45 Ghz.

    This wavelength is, contraty to popular belief, NOT the 'resonant frequency of water molecules', though in vacuo, an h2o molecule does have one resonant frequency near this (if memory servers). In liquid form, this gets far more complicated, and isn't useful. Also, if this WERE true, microwaves would not penetrate the object, but would be stopped by the first layer of resonanting molecules!

    At this frequency, polarized molecules (such as water) are shaken as the field oscillates. And shaking molecules = heat, right?

    The fact that microwaves operate at 2.45 Ghz is, I believe, the reason that the 2.4 Ghz ISM band exists in the first place. The band that is now used for a lot of htings, including wireless LAN stuff.

  • Yes, you correctly see that I was making a clever point about both the lack of distance specification in the specs and the fact that most of our office lives won't change from wireless networking -- how many people walk around needing to be connected on a laptop? -- when there is already a network drop every few feet, using for this purpose a pseudo top-ten list of current office activities and saying these will be the same for wireless networking. Nevertheless, even if something is incorrectly moded, if you don't have moderation points, do not request someone else to moderate something up: your not having moderation points probably means that you aren't deserving of them, which view your posting anonymously of course bolsters. In the past I have not used moderation points I otherwise would have to mod something up just because some jerk said "mod this up!!!": If it actually resulted in a mod up, then the 10X as many MOD UP!!! posts that are by idiots who aren't part of the community (or else would have mod points themselves) would think that their opinion matters on slashdot. If you happen to have mod points, mod something up. Otherwise, let someone else. No one will if you post MOD THIS UP!!!.
  • I've noticed a bunch of discussion on this, so I thought I'd dump a bit of reality on to the situation... First of all, there are currently two vendors that have working alpha chip implementations. The first is Radiata, which is discussed at length in this thread. The other is a company called Atheros (http://www.atheros.com). Both vendors create two-chip wireless CMOS solutions to operate in the 5 Ghz Unlicensed National Information Infrastructure band (UNII). Both vendors are implementing what is known as the IEEE 802.11a standard for wireless networking. This standard was ratified at the same time as IEEE 802.11b (June of 99 or so). However, unlike 802.11b, which sends 11 million bits per second through the air using a flavor of direct sequence modulation, 802.11a uses OFDM ((coded)orthogonal frequency division multiplexing)... they drop the C from the acronym for asthetic reasons. To answer some of the questions that have cropped up: 1) 802.11b and 802.11a use the exact same MAC. For the non-network literate, that simply means that the frame headers are arranged in the same way, and both use CSMA/CA (Carrier sense, multiple access with collision avoidance) as their method of transmission at layer-2. However, since 802.11b operates in the 2.4 Ghz spectrum, and 802.11a operates in the 5 Ghz spectrum, there is no chance for interoperability. The good news is that if someone ever writes a good wireless sniffer (ala TCPdump, but for the MAC layer), it will work with both .11a and .11b. 2) In terms of distance, the 5 Ghz band is broken up in to three subsegments. At the lower end, there are two 100 Mhz 'sections'. The first section at 5.150-5.250 Ghz is limited to 50 milliwatts EIRP (Effective Isotropically Radiated Power). The second section, at 5.250-5.350 Ghz, is limited to 250 mW EIRP. The third section is way up at the top, from 5.725-5.825 Ghz, and allows up to 1 W EIRP. The products from radiata and atheros operate in the lower two sections, with a maximum power of 50 mW across the whole 200 Mhz. There are several reasons for this, mostly due to the fact that for proper channel selection, it would be difficult to move from one channel to another if you had to change power output... In any case, 50 mW on one of these radios is enough to get you roughly 300 feet. 3) It is important to note that while these radios will offer a maximum distance of about 300 feet, you won't get 54 Mbps at that distance (54 Mbps is the highest speed that these radios implement on a single radio channel). The 802.11a standard specifies a number of encoding and modulation techniques which result in different bandwidths from 6 Mbps, to 12, 18, and 24 Mbps. Since the amount of frequency being used isn't changing, something else must be. In this case, it is the number of bits being transmitted per oscillation. (1,2,3, or 4). There is a direct trade-off between signal complexity and distance. The more complex a signal (the more bits/oscillation), the more quickly it degrades, and the more succeptible it is to interference. Thus, at 100 feet, you might get 54 Mbps, but at 120 feet, the signal becomes degraded, and so the radio drops to a less complex modulation scheme, and your throughput drops to 24 Mbps. Hope that clears up the issues regarding distance. Incidentally, the high 100 Mhz are 'reserved' for point to point wireless applications (at 1 watt). These have the potential to go up to 2 to 3 miles or more, depending on antenna design. Another interesting thing to note here is that while Radiata is an australian based company, they had planned on targeting the US market from day one... 802.11a is an IEEE standard, and is currently only going to be adopted in the US. In contrast, HIPERLAN/2 is the european standard of choice. It does NOT share a MAC with 802.11b, which is one reason the HIPERLAN/2 system is still under development. HIPERLAN/2 works on a time-division multiple access system (TDMA), and has its roots in "wireless ATM". (ATM being asynchronous transfer mode, not cash machine protocol). HIPERLAN/2 offers the promise of better guarantees for signal (QOS), because there is no contention for channel amongst devices. Let me keep rambling for one second more... Recently, Intelsil (the former radio electronics group from Harris Semiconductor) announced their own IEEE 802.11a wireless roadmap. The moral of the story here: The incumbants in this segment of the industry (intersil, lucent) are quietly making their own plans. 802.11a will take off, it will be big, it's just a matter of when.

  • 400Mbps Wireless IEEE1394 Home Networking (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    NEC Develops 400Mbps Wireless IEEE1394 Home Networking [nec.com]

    Transmission Distance of Up to 12 meters

    TOKYO January 26th, 2000 - NEC Corporation (NEC) (NASDAQ: NIPNY) has developed the world's first wireless transmission technology based on the IEEE1394 high-speed serial bus capable of 400 megabits (Mbps), at transmission ranges of up to 7 meters through interior walls and up to 12 meters by line-of-sight, bringing next-generation multimedia home networking another step closer to reality.

    IEEE1394 is well suited to multimedia networking in homes. With its Plug and Play capability, the absence of complicated ID settings and terminators, IEEE1394 offers ease of use, a key factor for home users. Moreover, its ability to connect up to 63 devices at a bandwidth of up to 400 Mbps, enables a variety of graphics, video, computer and other data to use the network simultaneously. By developing wireless IEEE1394 networking technology, such multimedia networks can now be created in the home without the need to install new wiring.

    To do this, the new technology uses 60GHz millimeter wavelength transmissions, which does not require any kind of license, with the ASK (amplitude shift keying) modulation scheme and the development of a low cost transceiver. Another key development enabling this technology, is the incorporation of an echo detection function in NEC's PD72880 400Mbps long-distance transmission physical layer device, to prevent the influence of signal reflections, a significant obstacle to stable operation of IEEE1394 over a wireless connection.

    As a result of these achievements, NEC believes wireless networking with the IEEE 1394 high-speed serial bus provides the ease of use, low cost and high performance that is required for effective multimedia home networking.

    Background

    The increasing use of combined audio-visual and computer data is leading to greater need for multimedia networking capabilities and already solutions are beginning to emerge. Standardization of multimedia networking in the home is already underway, and IEEE1394 is emerging as the leading contender, capable of interfacing with a number of AV, computer and other digital consumer electronics and providing transmission bandwidth of up to 400 Mbps.

    The main constraint on IEEE1394, however, has been its limitation to a transmission range over cable of 4.5 meters. NEC, soon began work on developing the IEEE1394 standard to enable transmissions over greater distances and announced its TERMBOY/MX-series of network adapters in June 1998 that are capable of distances over 50 meters using plastic optical fibre, aimed at installation of networks in newly constructed or refurbished homes. By additionally offering a wireless implementation of IEEE1394 that does not require any installation work, NEC has significantly expanded the marketability of the technology as the standard for home multimedia networks.

    While there are already several efforts underway to introduce wireless networking into homes, these only offer low bandwidths of several Kbps (kilobits per second) or Mbps, making it very difficult for them to offer the full multimedia transmission capabilities of IEEE1394.

    NEC's development is therefore highly significant in providing a new level of multimedia networking performance for the home, and researchers are working hard towards standardization of wireless IEEE1394. With this objective in mind, NEC expects products based on this new technology to be available by the end of 2000 and the company will continue to expand its research and development efforts in this field.


    About NEC Corporation

    NEC Corporation (NASDAQ: NIPNY) (FTSE: 6701q.l) pioneered the concept of C&C, the integration of Computers and Communications, and is the only company in the world to be counted among top ranking corporations spanning the wide range of fields essential for this vision of multimedia: computers, communications and electron devices. Employing in excess of 150,000 people around the world, NEC saw net sales in fiscal year 1998-99 amount to 4,759 billion yen (approx. US$40 billion). For further information, visit the NEC home page at: http://www.nec-global.com
  • Dont forget the Black Box they use in airplanes. The Ute - Utility truck. The BBQ. Secret ballot system - that most countries use to cast votes.
  • Hey, this just goes to show what is wrong with Australia. What the &^%*&^% does the Australian government have to do with this? Radiata, a private company, is bought by Cisco, a private company. What should the Government do? Step in and block the sale?

    Us aussies need to stop bleating to our government and start to do something ourselves.

  • The reason the ISM band exists is because it is not very useful for anything. For the very same reason that my microwave oven heats up my left-over curry (because it is 'absorbed' by the water) microwave communications really dont work well around organic things.

    The phenomenon is called green fade. Good luck trying to get a wavelan lan running in a jungle, the vegetation attenuates the signal badly. Or a rainstorm for that matter.

    .
  • Actually Radiata did have a private demo at the N+I demo in Atlanta. Your other comments were quite right on.

    Would the author of that note (xtp) please contact me at rberger[nospam] at ultradevices.com? He didn't leave an email address.

    We are working on such designs for WAN applications and we are looking for people knowledgable about the design, software and implementation of wireless lan/wan like products.

    Thanks!

  • My school was wireless ethernet setup for the main academic building and outside grouds. All freshman this year recived the cards as part of our laptop package which is now required as part of your tution. They decided to use Symbol's highspeed 11mpb wireless setup. I'd love to set this up in my house to use my thinkpad with it at home, to bad the cards are ~200USD and I couldn't even find a price for the access points.
  • Interestingly enough many people whole left W.A. for careers overseas are retiring back to WA
    I've noticed this as a difference between Australians and Americans. Many Australians travel to another part of the world, whether it be backpacking or working; and then return home. Many Americans, on the other hand, travel to another part of the US, discover that it's not as bad as the part they grew up in, and move there. Las Vegas, Nevada, has some ridiculously large percentage of non-natives; at the company I worked for, 2 out of about 20 people were born in Nevada.
  • [...]
    Clay lies still, but blood's a rover,
    Breath's a ware that will not keep,
    Up, Lad, when the journey's over.
    There'll be time enough to sleep.

  • Re:Um, old news? (Score:3)

    by Ralph Nader ( 252693 ) on Saturday November 18, 2000 @11:06PM (#614870) Homepage
    I am familar with the generation of television signal receivers you mention.

    In fact, mine also got 5 or 6 channels simultaneously. Not because of some fancy "picture in picture" but rather because the antenna used the "rabbit ears" protocol and all the channels would bleed together.

  • > --Want to know what a seagull tastes like? It is somewhere between Bald Eagle and White Rhinoceros.

    So what does Pink Elephant taste like?
  • This is making me sick! When will the aussie Gov ever learn that we produce some of the best goddamned tech in the world! *sigh* sometimes I find it dificult to be a patriot :-(
  • Without a distance specification, I assume this newfangled wireless thing will work
    within 10 feet
    of a hub/repeater/etc (perhaps including another end unit). (This assumption rises from the fact that they're obviously very proud of the capabilities it /does/ have, so they would have shoved the distance in your face if it were impressive.)

    So, with that in mind, a list of the top ten activities you can do 10 feet farther than your present office network drop:

    10 - Quake/other FPS (uh, only on your lunch break ;])
    9 - AIM/ICQ/IRC/ABC/XYZ
    8 - Internet.."research". (email)
    7 - Internet.."research". (/.)
    6 - Internet.."research". (pr0n...uh, only on your lunch break :])
    5 - Internet.."research". (build up ur homepage)
    4 - Editing office reports (your resume)
    3 - Editing office reports (your letter of resignation)
    2 - Doing productive work. (Churning code out)
    1 - Pretending to do productive work. (Staring at the beautiful code you've churned out)

  • like most Australian inventions, this one has only found serious commercial backing overseas
    I had the brain drain thing driven home to me recently. I went to a "smart kids" program in high school, here in Western Australia. Last weeekend, my school had an "old students day" (preparatory to the government demolishing the school at the end of the year -- nice one, Richard). I went there looking for my class mates. Mostly, the few that I found were the ones that, like myself, had returned from working overseas or in Australia's eastern states. The rest were still over there.

    That's right, way more than half my "smart kids" class had to leave Western Australia to find challenging and/or financially rewarding work.

  • They don't mention any sort of range. They also dont say if it requires line of sight, although since its an 802.11 family standard, I would have to assume that it does not. But could it _benefit_ from line of sight ?

    Given that you can build LOS point-to-point microwave xcvrs and get a few kilometers out of them, how well would this lend itself to effectively making wireless DS-3s ? I know it'd be much cheaper to put up two towers pointing at each other than it'd cost to pay for a full-clock DS-3 for even 1 _month_

    Nothing is said about antenna's or anything, so while its nice that they've got lots of functionality on these small chips (233 and 68 pins, iirc), if i need a big antenna it wont be a very nice device afterall.

    Finally, they mentioned that the R-5M or whatever chip supported half-duplex operation. Is this the norm in wireless ? A 54mbps half-duplex pipe seems like it could be a lot better on paper than in practice.
  • Manor is a big house, the one the squire (or ladies and gentlemen) live in!
  • I do believe the fridge was one, the lawn mower and the hills hoist. None were patented locally??

    Technology wise, PAL and BETA (yeah go one and knock these without understanding the _contrasts_ with their American counterparts), and also some fibre optic developments.

    Can we see a pattern?? Is the Australian Government to blame for not supporting development industries??
  • It's from "A Shropshire Lad" by A. E. Housman. The whole thing is pretty long, but has some good bits, for example:

    "Terence, this is stupid stuff:
    You eat your victuals fast enough;
    There can't be much amiss, 'tis clear,
    To see the rate you drink your beer.
    But oh, good Lord, the verse you make,
    It gives a chap the belly-ache.
    The cow, the old cow, she is dead;
    It sleeps well, the horned head:
    We poor lads, 'tis our turn now
    To hear such tunes as killed the cow.
    Pretty friendship 'tis to rhyme
    Your friends to death before their time
    Moping melancholy mad:
    Come, pipe a tune to dance to, lad."
  • Not to be rude, but is there any reason there's been so many Aussie stories on Slashdot as of late. Does CmdrTaco have kin in the outback?
  • Not to be rude, but is there any reason there's been so many Aussie stories on Slashdot as of late.

    Not to be rude, but is there any reason there's been so many US-only stories on Slashdot as of the past three years?

  • The article says it was sold for 500 Million dollars (Australian) which converts to aproximently 259,550,000 American dollars. So, the Slashdot article should have said for "quarter of a billion dollars". Still a lot of money.

  • Who wrote this poem(?), and what is it called?
  • The real obstacle for the take-up of wireless LANs is something that's been around for quite a while and probably isn't going to go away any time soon: government legislation.
    Here in the EU (I'm in Britain but most such legislation is controlled by the EU now) there is very tight legislation on what can be broadcast without a license, even over a very small distance. With all the concerns over mobile telephone radiation, power-line radiation and whatever else I really can't see this changing anytime soon.

    -- Piracy is a vicitmless crime, like punching someone in the dark.
  • Not always
    In some countries a billion is 1 million million
    eg UK

  • Same here.

    I went to a well respected PSA private boarding school in Perth. Most of my friends have either left Perth or are leaving Perth, including myself (doing a PhD in the eastern states of Australia). The fact that the school has regular reunions in London tells the same story.

    Perth is a great city to live in, (I love it to death). It's just that it doesn't have the career prospects and the ability to progress that other places do. And it is the most isolated city in the world, when you leave it is a long way back (eg. to fly Sydney-Perth return is around $550 and Sydney-London is about $850 return, the rest of Australia is almost as far away as the rest of the world to Perth).

    Interestingly enough many people whole left W.A. for careers overseas are retiring back to WA, like the head of the research Division at a very large Pharmaceutical company retiring to Margaret River WA, and why wouldn't you?

    I want to live in Perth but I don't think there is much prospect of me returning unless I eventually become an academic at one of the University at Home, (my mother is now finally resigned to this fact).

    Ahh well, I'm having a holiday at home in about a months time, I just can't wait. Good pubs, beaches and people what more do you want?

  • Re:Wireless Firewire at 100 Mbps Already (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Oh, yes, here's the link to relevant info at Radiata on the technology (it's a .pdf):

    http://www.radiata.com/company/PDF/IEEE-802.11wp.p df [radiata.com]

    And the technology really isn't theirs (or Australian), it's a collective standard drawing from many sources (like FireWire). It's positioned as the sucessor to 802.11b (wireless ethernet). The pdf has lots of cool info on data protocols in general and the new tech in specific.

Slashdot Top Deals

news: gotcha

Close