Archive for November, 2009

What’s next for Wi-Fi?

Nov 28

This story appeared on Network World at <http://www.networkworld.com/news/2009/111209-wifi-change.html>

What’s next for Wi-Fi?

Eight ways Wi-Fi will change following approval of the 802.11n wireless standard
By John Cox , Network World , 11/12/2009
<http://www.networkworld.com/news/2009/111209-wifi-change.html?fsrc=netflash-rss>

The recent formal approval of the IEEE 802.11n wireless standard marks not the end but the start of a wave of Wi-Fi innovation. In the next three to five years, the Wi-Fi experience will be very different from today.

802.11n price wars already underway

The huge 11n performance jump — to 300Mbps data rate and roughly 100M to 150Mbps throughput — will become the basis for unwiring work and life to a much greater extent than ever before. You can picture it as a fast-growing archipelago of wireless connectivity, with access points becoming more prevalent, interlinked in meshed clusters, and able to cooperate far more closely with smarter Wi-Fi clients. Here we’ve focused on eight ways Wi-Fi will change for the better, enabling improved signal quality, more reliable connections, optimized bandwidth, increased battery life and stronger security.

1. Broader broadband

Although the IEEE has launched two projects intended to bring gigabit and multi-gigabit data rates to the 802.11 standard, neither has come up with a first draft.

But the 11n standard makes possible a range of high data rates, which can be adapted to different functions and devices. Today, all 11n radios support two spatial data streams that are sent and received using some combination of two or three antennas, and these radios are set to appear in mobile devices. Apple’s newest Wi-Fi-only iPod touch, for instance, has a Broadcom radio chip that supports but doesn’t yet use11n.

Soon, more Wi-Fi chips will support three and even four data streams, with respective data rates of 450Mbps and 600Mbps. Early in 2009, Quantenna Communicationsdemonstrated its 4×4 chipset in action, streaming several high-def TV signals through a home-sized space.

“While there will not be a lot of client devices that support four spatial streams, properly designed access points will take advantage of the 600Mbps physical layer data rates to enable high-speed, wireless backbones,” says William Kish, co-founder and CTO of Wi-Fi equipment vendor Ruckus Wireless.

You’ll be able to mesh these high-end nodes via the 802.11s standard (due in September 2010), creating Internet-like Wi-Fi networks that are redundant and can route around failures.

2. Tougher radio frequency signals

More of 11n’s optional performance features will appear in radio chips, and be used in wireless clients and access points to make RF signals more resilient, consistent and reliable. In other words, more like a wire.

“This new [11n] physical layer technology will make Wi-Fi more robust, with higher data rates at given ranges, and at longer ranges,” says William McFarland, CTO for chipmaker Atheros Communications.

These performance features include: low-density parity check coding, which improves error correction; transmit beam forming, which uses feedback from a Wi-Fi client to let an access point focus the RF signal on the client; and space-time block coding (STBC), which exploits the multiple antennas more for improved signal reliability than for higher data rates.

[snip]

Re: O’Reilly Warns Of Web War

Nov 20

Posted by dewayne in List | No Comments

[Note: This comment comes from friend Erik Cecil. DLH]

From: Erik Cecil <erik.cecil@gmail.com>
Date: November 20, 2009 4:33:25 PM PST
To: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne@warpspeed.com>
Subject: Re: [Dewayne-Net] O’Reilly Warns Of Web War

Ironic that folks are only noticing now, but this is also far less apparent from outside the industry. We forget that the web is built on regulated telecom network that we later deregulated right at the moment competitive networks were creating entire new ecospheres. As a result carriers were able to leverage regulated versus deregulated and large ISPs, equipment vendors, etc. forced to adapt. This is why, as I’ve written extensively in Gordon Cook’s publication and other places that Net Neutrality is not only a non-solution, but worse than a solution as it retains the appearance of quasi-regulation in a space that only antitrust should seriously tread. It also shows us how utterly politicized regulation can become when no one can actually understand it. The only real long term solution is to put the tools of common carriage in the hands of individuals. This would not only begin to remedy the walled gardens at the physical and application layer it would also lend simplicity and transparency to attempts to regulate bad behavior with regard to copyright that utterly confuse actor, agent, and intermediary due to confusion between rational use of advanced technology and attempts to impose penalties on owners of technology without evidence of affirmative act or intent. The law simply cannot see the trees for the forest, when in fact, the actual problem is that intelligence is at the edge but legal power remains in the middle. We are more than overdue for a change because what OReilly misses is just how dangerous the existing regulatory structure is to the networks over which all of this activity occurs.

Regards,

Erik J. Cecil, Esq.
Source Law, PC

O’Reilly Warns Of Web War

The Web, which began life as an open community where information and tools were freely shared across geographic, political, and social boundaries, is in danger of becoming segmented into a federation of closed camps led by a handful of increasingly powerful vendors, said Internet pundit Tim O’Reilly. O’Reilly said efforts by Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, and other tech vendors — as well as publishers like Rupert Murdoch’s Dow Jones — to create closed communities around their products and services are jeopardizing the freedom, and the spirit, of the Web. “It’s no longer about the Internet as a platform,” said O’Reilly. “It’s Google as a platform, it’s Amazon as a platform, it’s Microsoft as a platform,” he said

<http://www.informationweek.com/news/internet/web2.0/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=221800396>

Bye-bye, Verizon, and good riddance!

Nov 20

Posted by dewayne in List | No Comments

[Note: This item comes from friend Steve Goldstein. DLH]

From: Steve Goldstein <steve.goldstein@cox.net>
Date: November 20, 2009 10:00:34 AM PST
To: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne@warpspeed.com>
Subject: Bye-bye, Verizon, and good riddance!

Personal experience: Verizon Service is an oxymoron. Cox Communications totally shines by comparison.

The facts, ma’am: We had two-line copper wire telephone service (from the time when one line was almost dedicated to dial up Internet) with the corporate progression of Ma Bell, Bell Atlantic and finally, Verizon for about 20 years. Years ago (do I date myself too much?) when something went wrong with our phone, we would dial 611, and one of Ma Bell’s friendly real people answered and dispatched a cousin to fix it within a day if it could not be trouble-shot and fixed from the Central Office. NO MORE! Line 1 went dead on November 3. When I connected to Verizon’s Network Interface Device, no dial tone could be heard on Line 1, meaning that the trouble was on their side of the divide. At first, I could not find a telephone number to call to report the outage, but I was able to to report it on the Verizon.com web site. When I finally found a telephone number for reporting the outage, all I got was the “press n” recorded message runaround–probably a less effective way of trying to report it than on the web page. During the next eight days, I got spurious calls on my iPhone that spoke so fast that I did not realize that they were from Verizon until it was too late to copy down the information, but one purported to say that my situation had been resolved (as in “we resolve to screw with this customer”?).

Finally, on day 9 (Nov. 12th), I got a phone call from a Verizon technician (Mickey); he was on the way to my house to repair the outage. Well, Mickey was no mouse. He knew his stuff and fixed the problem which was caused by a faulty pair in the pedestal in the street (corrosion, he surmised). But, by then, I was so fed up with Verizon’s poor responsiveness that I had already placed an order to switch my service to my cable and Internet provider, Cox Communications. But, I did not tell Mickey about that, because I was not sure that Cox would show up as promised.

Cox showed up at 8:30 AM the next day (Friday, the 13th, to boot!), and to make a long, sad tale as short as possible, I had two technicians here who seemed to know their stuff, but they could not make my internal phone setup work (I have all kinds of line-branching in the house, some of which I created myself over the years as I tapped the wire bundles downstream to add jacks in rooms that previously had no service — none of it documented; also a tangle of wires at the entry point that resembled a tumbleweed)–they finally left me with a totally bollixed system at 6:30 PM, and asked me to call in a further repair order, which I did.

To my pleasant surprise, Cox called me back on Saturday, and another Cox technician arrived on Sunday evening at 4:30 PM, a half hour earlier than scheduled, and in 1-1/2 hours had the whole house, both Lines 1 and 2, back and working! Somehow, he was able to spot two wires in the tangle that the others had failed to connect, and he connected them. He also found that the FAX on my HP All-In-One printer was shorted out, and was therefore causing the phone in my office to malfunction (actually, I later diagnosed that the problem was that I had connected it with a 4-wire telephone cable and not the 2-wire one that had been supplied with the printer). The Cox guy was great, and even more to the point, I was able to work through my situation with a real human being in an office not more than a 20-minute drive from my home, and service was swift, responsive, and self-correcting when they did not get it right the first time. I have always held that the true measure of a system is not whether or not it fails, but how it responds to fix the failure. Kudos to Cox on that score!

So, bye-bye and good riddance, Verizon, Fiends of FIOS, and welcome, Cox!

–Steve

Why conference Wi-Fi sucks and how to improve it

Nov 20

Posted by dewayne in List | No Comments

[Note: This item comes from friend Esme Vos. DLH]

Why conference Wi-Fi sucks and how to improve it
November 19, 2009 at 11:35 AM by Esme Vos
<http://www.muniwireless.com/2009/11/19/why-conference-wifi-sucks-and-how-to-improve-it/>

I was inspired to do a long article about Wi-Fi at conferences by Joel Spolsky’s article Wi-Fi At Conferences where he asks why Wi-Fi works so poorly at tech conferences. Muniwireless has organized conferences in the past and I won’t say that the Wi-Fi at our events has ben the very best either (however, it was better than at most events I’ve attended). You would think that by now, Wi-Fi access at conferences, especially tech events, would be something no one would even notice — that is, it should just work well. But that’s rarely the case.

Dewayne Hendricks (who has provided Wi-Fi at David Isenberg’s Freedom To Connect events in Washington DC, Social Capital 2009 in San Francisco, West Coast Green 2009 in San Francisco and others) pointed out that in many hotels and conference centers, the existing Wi-Fi network can handle only 20 to 25 connections at one time and the bandwidth for the network is barely enough for people who are downloading and uploading data. Conferences today have to deal with people who are updating blogs, Twitter feeds, and Facebook pages, and who are sending photos, video clips, and reports. Some attendees are also using Skype and other VOIP applications. Unfortunately, many venues are too cheap to install new 802.11n access points, and because the bandwidth that feeds into the network is too paltry, the conference organizer – if it wants to guarantee a good Wi-Fi experience – will have to bring in both the access points AND the bandwidth (for example, Covad). This dramatically increases the cost of hosting an event. (Note: Dewayne used Apple Airport Extreme 802.11n access points which worked very well at the Freedom to Connect event held in March 2009 at the AFI Silver Theater in Silver Spring, MD. I attended this event and would rate the Wi-Fi experience outstanding.)

[snip]

The myth of interference: bad science created the broadcast industry

Nov 10

Posted by dewayne in List | No Comments

The myth of interference: bad science created the broadcast industry

[Commentary] There’s a reason our television sets so outgun us, spraying us with trillions of bits while we respond only with the laughable trickles from our remotes. To enable signals to get through intact, the government has to divide the spectrum of frequencies into bands, which it then licenses to particular broadcasters. NBC has a license and you don’t. Thus, NBC gets to bathe you in “Friends,” followed by a very special “Scrubs,” and you get to sit passively on your couch. It’s an asymmetric bargain that dominates our cultural, economic and political lives — only the rich and famous can deliver their messages — and it’s all based on the fact that radio waves in their untamed habitat interfere with one another. Except they don’t. “Interference is a metaphor that paints an old limitation of technology as a fact of nature.” So says David P. Reed, electrical engineer, computer scientist, and one of the architects of the Internet. If he’s right, then spectrum isn’t a resource to be divvied up like gold or parceled out like land. It’s not even a set of pipes with their capacity limited by how wide they are or an aerial highway with white lines to maintain order. Spectrum is more like the colors of the rainbow, including the ones our eyes can’t discern. Says Reed: “There’s no scarcity of spectrum any more than there’s a scarcity of the color green. We could instantly hook up to the Internet everyone who can pick up a radio signal, and they could pump through as many bits as they could ever want. We’d go from an economy of digital scarcity to an economy of digital abundance.” So throw out the rulebook on what should be regulated and what shouldn’t. Rethink completely the role of the Federal Communications Commission in deciding who gets allocated what. If Reed is right, nearly a century of government policy on how to best administer the airwaves needs to be reconfigured, from the bottom up.

<http://dir.salon.com/story/tech/feature/2003/03/12/spectrum/>

Courtesy of the Benton Foundation <http://www.benton.org>

The myth of interference: bad science created the broadcast industry

Nov 10

Posted by dewayne in List | No Comments

The myth of interference: bad science created the broadcast industry

<http://dir.salon.com/story/tech/feature/2003/03/12/spectrum/>

Courtesy of the Benton Foundation <http://www.benton.org>

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