On 23 Jul 2006 22:52:00 GMT, phil-news-nospam@ipal.net wrote:

>If you had a committee intent on designing the best technology, then
>it could do so. If element A and element B cannot coexist unless one
>of them is less than optimal, then that's where technical tradeoffs
>might have to be made, or more research done to solve a problem.

Standards committees have exactly one goal. To agree upon a workable
standard. Whether that standard offers the superior technology or
optimum solution is not as important as coming to a consensus. I've
seen some really good ideas get ignored or voted down simply because
they would not be acceptable to some of the voting members because of
licensing or business reasons.

>Committees formed of manufacturers, however, tend to be more about
>promoting their technology to the others, rather than making something
>that works better.

Exactly. However, the same manufacturers realize that if they don't
compromise and come to an agreement, they're going to end up with a
proprietary and fragmented market. Therefore, everyone gives up a
little for the common goal of achieving consensus and a standard.

>I'd expect a little better of IEEE than what I have seen, although to
>a great degree they have done reasonably well.

I would say they have done amazingly well until the 802.11n (MIMO)
debacle. I don't know exactly what went wrong but the traditional
consortia, consensus and compromise seems to have failed completely.

Incidentally, here are the 802.11 committee timelines:
http://grouper.ieee.org/groups/802/1..._Timelines.htm
802.11n is up to Jan 08 for final approval. Yech.

>The early TCP/IP standards were developed in quite different ways, and
>in many ways are quite superior to what you could get by a committee
>of manufacturers.

Sure. There are now 4,590 RFC's and I don't know how many pending
proposals:
http://www.ietf.org/iesg/1rfc_index.txt
There are now 25 802.11 sub-committees. Yep, very different.

>The concept of the technology was known long before that.

Sure. The Telebit T2000 modem was a form of OFDM. It works really
nice for eliminating the effects of frequency variable delays (group
delay) and reflections (termination issues in telco).

>Driving
>the demand for a technology can create the ability to make it work
>sooner. Would you have simply never done OFDM had the DMT work never
>been done? That would be stupid. The CPU speed to do OFDM really
>was around even in 1996. It just wants _architectured_ in a way most
>suitable for it.

"Wants"? I think you mean't "wasn't". I agree. It was the lack of
the dedicated DSP's and sufficient processor horsepower to make an
economical product, or perhaps a cost issue. Whatever, it doesn't
matter. The original design goals of 1 and 2Mbits/sec was easily
accomplished with straight FM modulation, no amplitude component, and
really simple (and cheap) hardware. One could have done OFDM, but you
could not have afforded the resultant product.

I'll try again for the third time. It took about 9 years to get form
the original 802.11 committee to today. Please predict the necessary
technology necessary for the wireless products of 2015. Good luck.

>This is like a chicken and egg problem. They won't make the technology
>unless there is a demand for it. There won't be a demand for it if we
>decide to only use what already exists. Someone has to think ahead to
>get out of that vicious circle.

Sure. However, that's not how standards committees operate. The
resultant product MUST be commerically viable with a minimum of R&D.
It makes no sense to base a new standard on a technology that may not
even work, be manufacturable or be affordable. Therefore, mediocrity
is often selected over the next big thing on the horizon. Where the
committee draws the line is often even more conservative. As I
previously mentioned, the IETF won't even accept an RFC for anything
does does not have at least 2 working implimentations.

>So basically, it sounds like the 802.11 group was stuck in a vicious
>circle and the telco group decided to get out of it.

Actually, there were far worse problems. One particular major
manufacturer decided that it was in their best interest to maintain
their propietary product position and did their best to derrail the
voting. It was so bad that a few vendors got together and formed the
HomeRF Alliance in the hope that they could get something together
before the IEEE came to a decision. It didn't fly, mostly because
HomeRF used FHSS which the FCC intentionally crippled to insure the
predominance of the IEEE specification. There were other horror
stories I don't wanna detail. To their credit, the committee members
continued forward without the malcontents and eventually ironed out a
standard. No vicious circle anywhere in sight.

>In 1996 I had no interest in doing wireless. I was doing other things.

So was I. I got involved in about 1997 or 98. The original
complaints were "why is this thing so complicated"? Now days, it's
"why didn't they throw in more than just the kitchen sink". Sigh.

>But I do think it is not outside of reason to ask for _every_ wireless
>device in a home or small office to be able to communicate with _every_
>other device there, when it has traffic specifically for it.

That's what ad-hoc (peer to peer) wireless networking mode is suppose
to address. There are no access points. Every bridge radio is a
client. Everyone can talk to everyone else. The only limitation is
that no repeater was specified for ad-hoc. That means you have to be
able to directly see (line of sight) any radio you want to talk to.
With the addition of a repeater feature, we have mesh networking.

>| Yep. The surest sign of success is pollution. Wireless is certainly
>| successful.

>I wouldn't necessarily use success. The term "popular" comes to mind
>as being more appropriate.

Fine. The surest sign of popularity is pollution. Wireless is
certainly successful. Same thing in my humble opinion.

>Of course manufacturers would consider it
>to be successful if larger numebrs of units are sold, regardless whether
>the buyers find it usable or not.

Fine. If the customers are not able to judge whether something works
or not, who is? The government? Consumer reports? Methinks not.
Most customers are quite capeable of deterining if something is useful
and will usually buy more if they like it. If there was anything
fundamentally wrong with the millions of 802.11 devices sold each
year, you would certainly hear about it. Even defective WEP
encryption couldn't kill the market.

>Of course non-usable can result in
>later sales going down. Ultimately I think people need to determine
>where they really need wireless and use it there and avoid it in other
>places.

Actually, most wireless growth has been in areas where there are
adequate alternatives (i.e. CAT5 ethernet) but where wireless is more
of a convenience than a necessity.

>| Actually, quite the contrary. Most of the original participants were
>| academics, not greedy corporate exploiters. Note that the fastest
>| speed considered useful in 1996 was 2Mbits/sec.
>
>So why would they want to make each frame spedn air time TWICE?

"spedn"? The only devices that do that are repeaters and WDS bridges.
It's NOT a problem if the airspace to each endpoint is isolated and
only the repeater or WDS bridge can hear the endpoints. It's a major
problem if they're all in the same airspace. Nobody "wanted" to do it
that way as evident by the late arrival of repeaters and WDS bridges
to the market. The manufacturers were fully aware of the real and
potential problems with repeaters. However, the market demanded a
solution and they provided one, even though it was inefficient. Look
around and see how many other inefficiencies are designed into
products in the name of expediency, cost, or convenience. Nobody
likes inefficiencies, but they're a fact of life in product design and
marketing.

>Even Linksys did for a while in
>the early WRT54G. And somehow they did realize it would be good to
>have the WRTG54GL on the market. Maybe they figured Linux developers
>could find and open up new wireless uses.

You give Linksys/Cisco far too much credit. I suspect that they had
no clue what people were doing with the WRT54G. At best, they may
have thought it was some kind of "hobby" market. Anyway, to these
people, Linux does NOT offer any type of marketing advantage over
something proprietary like VxWorks. Obviously, for your application,
Linux has a definite advantage as it is almost infinitely configurable
and can be built to do almost anything.

--
# Jeff Liebermann 150 Felker St #D Santa Cruz CA 95060
# 831-336-2558 jeffl@comix.santa-cruz.ca.us
# http://802.11junk.com jeffl@cruzio.com
# http://www.LearnByDestroying.com AE6KS