Wireless

Expect lots more wireless products, better throughputs, higher range, and tons of applications next year. That pretty much sums up the excitement in this domain.

Sunday, December 18, 2005

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This was the year of innovation in wireless technologies, of standards wars and ratifications and of new developments. Till date, one could nicely categorize all wireless technologies. There was 802.11a/b/g for Wireless LANs, Bluetooth for wireless PANs, GSM/GPRS/CDMA for wireless WANs, RFIDs for supply chain management, etc (see 'Key Terms'). All these technologies have had high degrees of penetration in their respective markets. But in the recent past, several other wireless technologies have been under development, which promise to blur out these fine categories and compete head on with existing technologies. Whether a technology lives or fades away, the good news for all of us is that there will be lots of different wireless applications around to improve our quality of life-at home, at work, on a vacation or traveling. Let's look at the action that's been happening in all of these to determine what's in store for you next year. 

Blast from the past
Many key trends this year have boosted  wireless applications. One was the steep drop in prices of wireless access points, and the onslaught of a wide range of wireless routers from different vendors for SOHO . As a result, anybody could quickly set up a wireless network. Today, you can buy a wireless router for as little as Rs 3,000, and most notebooks anyways come with built-in WiFi capabilities, making it easy to set up a wireless network. We also saw many innovative wireless devices hit the market, like the ASUS's wireless NAS box and the Netgear's wireless travel router. The NAS box had a hard drive and embedded software that allowed the box to act as a file server. You could create users and give them access to storage space on the hard drive. Users could then access their allotted storage space over WiFi. The travel router was a tiny wireless router that could be put in your notebook. You could even plug it into a DSL line and have wireless Internet access wherever you want. 802.11g became the de-facto WiFi standard in India , while 802.11b phased out. In Wireless WANs, the number of GSM subscribers grew to a whopping 53 mn in India , and in CDMA, it grew to 14.35 mn. Bluetooth grew in popularity this year, with a slew of applications and products. For instance, one of the world's largest wireless healthcare networks was implemented using Bluetooth in Copenhagen in October this year. The technology managed to get lot of products, whether they were access points, headsets, office equipment, PC, audio/visual equipment, automobiles, keyboards, mice, healthcare, mobile phones, GPS, or you name it.

Standards wars  
This was also the year of standards wars and ratifications. The 802.11i security standard for instance went into full effect this year. Being an issue in WiFi networks, many security techniques have been worked out, be it WEP or MAC-based filtering. The one that has finally become popular is WPA or WiFi Protected Access. It was ratified in June 2004, and this year, products based on this standard streamed in at full flow. This year, the next version to this standard, WPA 2 also came into being, and Win XP started supporting it in May. The WPA implements most of the 802.11i standard specs as proposed by IEEE. As security has always been a concern on WiFi networks, this standard has helped alleviate some of the issues and will go a long way in helping more organizations implement WiFi networks over the coming year.

Coming to standards wars, one has been for higher-speed wireless access, which would take WiFi throughput beyond the current 54 Mbps to a theoretical maximum of 540 Mbps. This will be achieved using  MIMO (Multiple In Multiple Out) and based on IEEE 802.11n standard, and two groups have been fighting it out with competing proposals since 2004, TGn Sync and WWiSE. This year, they decided to merge their proposals and send it for approval. The results for the same will be declared by mid 2006. So hopefully, we should see WLAN speeds soar towards the second half of 2006 with mutual agreement between both factions. This doesn't, however, mean that you should put on hold your plans of implementing WiFi. Study your WiFi needs carefully and if the current technologies are able to meet them, go ahead and use them. In fact, even if you must have high-speed wireless today, some pre-802.11n standard based products are already available (September 2005 WiFi Access Point shootout).

Rising competition and choices  
Like we said, new wireless technologies are being developed. One is WiMax-currently aimed as a high-speed wireless broadband technology that can work within a radius of 3–10 kms. It's expected to replace DSL and cable as the last mile solution. Even mobile users in a city can use it within a radius of 3 kms and get up to 15 Mbps bandwidth. It's expected to be incorporated in notebooks and PDAs next year. Besides DSL and cable, it could also pull users of GPRS and CDMA, who don't travel much. Since the technology is more efficient than 802.11, who knows it could also end up replacing that. But don't worry about it, as that's not bound to happen next year at least.

Hit or Miss

Buffalo AirStation MIMO WZR-G108  Pre-802.11n standard based products are already available in the market offering higher throughputs than conventional 802.11g based products. This one offers a theoretical 108 Mbps, and practically it crossed 31 Mbps in our tests. That is something no other AP that we tested could reach. You'll find more products based on it next year-once the 802.11n specification gets ratified.

ASUS Wireless Hard Drive  Okay, so you thought hard disks came only on IDE, SCSI and USB. Now it comes on wireless too. And the WL-HDD2.5 also doubles as an access point. So, if you need to quickly set up a file-server for your department, all you need are: a suitably sized hard disk, a power outlet and the WL-HDD2.5. The box can fit one standard two-and-a-half inch Ultra DMA 100 IDE hard disks, available in the 40 and 80 GB capacities.

On the Wireless PANs front, Bluetooth is getting ready for its next version. Though the current Enhanced Data Rate Version has seen tremendous success in terms of support for devices, its bandwidth is still limited to only 2.1 Mbps. That's why the Bluetooth SIG (Special Interest Group) is now in talks with UltraWide Band manufacturers to use their technology in Bluetooth. This would give a significant boost to the throughput. At the same time, another technology called Wireless USB based on UWB is also underway, which is supposed replace the current 'wired' USB standard, offering a similar 480 Mbps throughput. Remember how the wired USB managed to replace most other interfaces? Do you talk of the serial and parallel ports now? Everything is USB. The wireless version aims to convert everything to wireless. It's fairly ambitious, and in direct competition to Bluetooth, but we can't say anything till some products hit the market.

Conclusion  
These developments paint a very exciting picture of the wireless world. As we said, everything wireline-PANs, LANs, MANs or WANs-is going wireless now. So you can imagine the number of applications that will result from it. It's not possible to capture all the excitement in few pages, so watch out for coming issues next year for more.

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