Super WiFi

Description

"A new type of “super Wi-Fi” networking standard could be available by early next year if approved by the Federal Communication Commission.

The FCC will be voting next week on whether to allow the utilization of the white space portion of the television broadcast spectrum. Approval of the motion could pave the way for new so-called “super Wi-Fi” devices as soon as early next year.

These new devices would be capable of transmitting the Wi-Fi signal over a potential range of several miles, rather than just hundreds of feet, would not be interrupted by walls and other obstructions, and would be as fast as today’s broadband and DSL connections." (http://www.myce.com/news/super-wi-fi-devices-could-launch-in-early-2011-34310/)

Discussion

The Economist:

"Many in the wireless industry have reservations over whether Super Wi-Fi (or IEEE 802.22 as it is known technically) can actually deliver the goods as easily and cheaply as the wonks in Washington seem to imagine. Yes, it would allow broadband to be delivered wirelessly like Wi-Fi, but over much greater distances—in theory, up to 60 miles or so, compared with Wi-Fi’s 400 feet. But that does not mean wireless “hotspots” will suddenly expand from covering a few thousand square feet to sprawling over a few thousand square miles. That is never going to happen.

In crowded urban markets, Super Wi-Fi distributed from a single antenna even just 20 miles away would not be able to supply anywhere near enough data capacity to cope with the demand. With Super Wi-Fi’s broadcasting power limited in urban areas for the foreseeable future to 40 milliwatts, to avoid interfering with local television stations, and the same signal being shared by thousands or even millions of city dwellers, download speeds would be glacially slow. The only way to make Super Wi-Fi work in metro areas would be to install antennas a mile or so apart. Even then, download and upload speeds would be no better than clunky old DSL.

Out in the countryside, things would be a lot different. With homes few and far between, Super Wi-Fi would be a cheaper way of delivering broadband (at, say, 1.5 megabits per second download and 384 kilobits per second upload) than either cable or DSL.

That said, unlicensed white space is just too valuable a public resource not to be fully exploited. Indeed, the mobile-phone companies, far from seeing Super Wi-Fi operating in white space as a threat to their proprietary networks, have big plans for offloading much of their data traffic onto these public airwaves. According to comScore, a market research company headquartered in Reston, Virginia, more than 37% of mobile-phone traffic, and over 90% of tablet traffic, already goes by Wi-Fi rather than the carriers’ own cellular networks.

With spectrum scarce, the mobile-phone companies have been building regular Wi-Fi hotspots as fast as they can—so they can offload data from their congested private networks to Wi-Fi’s unlicensed public bands. Doing so, helps them maintain the quality of service for other customers texting or trying to make phone calls.

So far, AT&T has built some 30,000 hotspots to help cope with the tripling in data traffic it has experienced over the past year, with a further tripling expected in the year ahead as the iPad 3 hits the market along with dozens of slicker Android tablets. Altogether, there are now 1.3m hotspots across America, a figure that is expected to grow to 5m by 2015, reckons Informa Telecoms and Media, a market research firm based in the United Kingdom. Like other mobile carriers, AT&T considers unlicensed white space as an ideal way for hauling data back from the hotspots it has built in neighborhoods to its cellular network, without having to use its own precious spectrum.

Indeed, backhaul looks like being the biggest single application for white space. At Rice University in Houston, Texas, home to the first residential Super Wi-Fi network, white-space is used to carry data back from a series of conventional Wi-Fi routers scattered around the campus. In the future, white space will have other, more prosaic applications—such as linking machines autonomously to other machines in a so-called “internet of things”.

Before then, “real” Super Wi-Fi will have arrived. “Gigabit Wi-Fi” (known technically as IEEE 802.11ac) will be at least three times faster than existing Wi-Fi (IEEE 802.11n)—thanks to having up to four times the frequency bandwidth available to it, and up to twice as many antennas as the best of today’s wireless routers. But operating exclusively in the five gigahertz band, it will have a somewhat shorter range than regular Wi-Fi (which functions mostly in the congested, but slightly longer range, 2.4 gigahertz band, as well five gigahertz these days). Even so, Gigabit Wi-Fi’s raw speed will come in handy for moving data-intensive files like high-definition video around the place. Rumour has it that the iPad 3 will ship with a Gigabit Wi-Fi chip inside it.

Meanwhile, one final piece of the evolving Wi-Fi puzzle is dropping into place. This is a way of letting people with smart-phones, tablets or laptops roam from one Wi-Fi hotspot to another, without having to log on repeatedly and authenticate themselves. For lots of users, the fiddle of having to enter credentials, encryption keys and other details is enough to prevent them wandering around.

So, if wireless carriers are to charge subscribers for using their Wi-Fi services (and they will, because someone has to pay for all the maintenance and backhaul), then users have the right to demand that moving from one hotspot to another becomes as seamless as roaming on a proprietary cellular network.

To the rescue, the Wi-Fi Alliance has developed something called Passport, which implements an emerging IEEE protocol (known as 802.11u) to automate the whole cumbersome process of network discovery, registration and access that users have to do manually today. In the process, Passport ensures that all certified Wi-Fi networks operate seamlessly and securely with one another—to provide a ubiquitous, hassle-free service.

Put Passport together with white space or even Gigabit Wi-Fi, and the 802.11 scene begins to look remarkably like the cellular one. Coexisting side by side, they would appear to be a pair of parallel wireless universes—one closed and proprietary, the other open and as freely available as Wi-Fi is today." (http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2012/02/beyond-wi-fi)