Business Week interviews Intel Wi-Fi guy: The article has its ups and downs. For instance, it intros with the interviewer mentioning that Wi-Fi is a $1.67 billion business in 2003, but then says we have Intel to thank for it. Odd because the vast majority of that money this year (not next) will have little to do with Intel.
In the interview proper, Jim Johnson says Our Centrino products, enabling mobility, will speed up Wi-Fi adoption. And with millions of Centrino notebooks out, carriers will be motivated to resolve these issues... This is absolutely true: many changes have already been made due to Centrino verification by Intel.
But then Johnson talks about 802.16a: [it] will have a 31-mile linear service range -- a huge improvement over Wi-Fi's 300-foot radius. It will also offer much higher speeds, of up to 70 megabits per second, vs. 11 for Wi-Fi. Wi-Fi has been run over 20 to 40 miles, depending on speed. And non-Wi-Fi FH and DS have run the same distances. So that's not a real parameter even though Wi-Fi isn't designed for those long distances and 802.16a can certainly improve on that.
The 70 Mbps versus 11 Mbps is an Intel-ism: because Intel doesn't offer 54 Mbps a or g flavors, Wi-Fi is 11 Mbps -- even though Wi-Fi, the trademark, includes 54 Mbps 802.11a as one of its two current certified standards. Intel is a Wi-Fi Alliance board member.
(Interestingly, Johnson's predecessor is now in charge of Intel Capital's wireless investments.)
802.16a sure is getting a lot of hype lately, but with everyone talking about its speed and range, nobody is giving ANY specifics. Like which frequency at what power with what antenna? With every part of the system being an unknown value, where are they pulling these numbers from?
Here's something that I wrote on another newsletter when a similar thought on 802.16 came up:
I have not studied the final 802.16a yet, but from looking at 802.16 about a year ago, I got the impression that 802.16 is to 802.11 as 802.12 VG-AnyLAN was to 802.3 Fast (100Mbps) Ethernet.
For those of you who might not have been around in those early years of physical networks, 802.3 100bT Fast Ethernet and 802.12 VG-AnyLan were considered competitors in 1994 with VG-AnyLan offering "advanced QoS features making it more suitable for Enterprise applications"
The claims even sound similar:
The 802.12 standard for 100 VG-AnyLAN allows for a backbone supporting both the 802.3 frames and the 802.5 frames. This means that an existing enterprise network with both token ring, ethernet, and some central backbone can easily migrate to the 100 VG-AnyLAN environment. This is due to the diverse media architecture this new technology can utilize: Cat. 3,4,&5 four pair UTP, Cat. 2 two pair STP, and single/multimode optical fiber. Meaning that if there is an existing FDDI, token ring, or 10baseT backbone in place all that need be done is simply replace the endpoints (router or HUB blades), connect the 100 VG-AnyLAN repeaters together, and voila a network structure based on a high speed new technology.
Highlights
# Support for those applications demanding a not only high bandwidth, but that are also time sensitive (this is due to the media access method called demand priority)
# Adapt legacy ethernet and tokenring networks to a high speed backbone with great ease because nodes with 100 VG adapters can be configured to transmit either tokenring or ethernet
# Extremely expandable when compared to tokenring, and all forms of ethernet
# Maximum network diameter 8000 meters
# Cascading up to five levels
(from http://www.eece.unm.edu/faculty/rjordan/440/ether/100VG.html)
Here's an obituary from a 100VG AnyLan FAQ (http://www.io.com/~richardr/vg/)
Hi! Welcome to V1.2 of Richard's Unofficial 100VG AnyLan Web FAQ! This substance of this FAQ was last updated on Sunday, January 28, 1997.
January, 2001: At one time, 100VG AnyLan was a very promising technology. However, due to market forces (Fast Ethernet slaughtered it in the market), VG is a dead technology. To my knowledge, there no currently no VG products for sale.
I suspect we will be seeing something similar for 802.16 in a few years when there will be several new PHYs including Ultra-wideband or equivilant with
100's of Mbps throughput and a "switch fabric in the air" for 802.11...
hallo to all
could you please tell me where in south africa i can get hold of bluetooth wireless transmitters and recievers for the range between 10M - 200Meters
thank you
kind regards
louis enslin