You might not recall the wise old proverb: Listen and learn from all those bearing the name Tim. It has a catchy ring to it… Anyways, I saw a story from Slashdot as I was heading for bed last night, LanLinkup. I poked my head in and read through a pretty cool project. The mission of LanLinkup is to be able to ‘ping’ from the East coast to the West coast using wireless connections, no land-lines. Now you’re scratching your head and wondering “How does this work and what’s in it for me and why doesn’t Little Caesar’s deliver anymore?”
Well that last part was a trick question, Little Caesar’s never delivered in the first place, so you’ve been had by some hadster. Anyways, if you’ve used a cordless phone, mobile phone, pager or even a plain old radio, you are actually somewhat familiar with wireless technology. What you probably are not familiar with are the acronyms, jargon and standards that fall under the umbrella of the term ‘WiFi’ when it is used today (like now).
A quick overview. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) put together a standard for wireless Ethernet back in 1997 sanctimoniously titled: 802.11 (the 8 represents peace, the 0 represents love and the 2 represents harmony. The two 1’s stand for gullible).
802.11 then branched out into a “b” version which pumped up the transmission speed from a couple of megabits per second (Mbps) in the original version to up to 11 Mbps along with a few more tweaks. But this was not to last much longer as two more standards were introduced and are now being developed and deployed, 802.11a and 802.11g (this is worse than the TI calculator nomenclature). 802.11a operates at the 5-6 ghz radio wave spectrum whereas the other 3 all work in the 2.4 ghz wavelength (many cordless phones operate in this spectrum which can cause “fuzzy” interference, also known as static or loss of connection).
Both 802.11a and 802.11g are capable of even faster speeds, both maxing out at around 54 Mbps. A couple of notes however, 802.11g is entirely backwards compatible with 802.11b and 802.11 whereas 802.11a is self-centered and is only compatible with 802.11 (and you thought RSS was annoying). And the maximum range for all of these versions is about 150 Texas feet which is equivalent to 45-50 meters.
So what does this mean to you? Well, eventually all of the standards will be available for mass consumption and most importantly, manufactures will most probably include support for all of them in one nice little package (like a Swiss Army knife). Oh, and I might as well throw Bluetooth in here at this time, it is yet another wireless standard. It operates in the 2.45 ghz part of the radio spectrum. It’s range is only 10 meters though and transmits (in its current version) less than 1 Mbps (around 768 Kbps).
Bluetooth is like the E2K chip for the CPU industry or a Bitboys Glaze 3D for video cards or a secure version of Windows for the operating system market: lots of vapor and paper, little, well I don’t have anything to rhyme with those, but very little market penetration at first (Bluetooth enabled appliances are ubiquitous finally).
Believe it or not (really, go ahead) but Apple Inc. has been promoting and deploying wireless technologies like 802.11b and Bluetooth for some time now. Their Airport station has been around for about 3 years now and was just recently upgraded to “Extreme” status, which translates to: 802.11g compliance.
So what does this all really mean for you? Well, remember 10 years ago when cell phones hit the market, those gigantic analog beasts that were about as portable and fun to carry as the original Netwon was. Yea, they didn’t quite fit in your pocket, they didn’t always work and they didn’t exactly cost a few bucks. Today however, many cell phones can fit in your pocket; most always work and are in many cases, free or deeply discounted. Just think of WiFi as being about 4-5 years behind cell phones in terms of deployment and usage. It’s not 10 years behind because the technology has been around for several years now, much of which has been deployed concurrently with cell phone’s, PDAs, laptops and even kitchen appliances.
One of the coolest possibilities that WiFi holds is the possibility of “free” access to any and all information, without restrictions or regulations, the ultimate in free-trade (if you were to put it in terms of economics). Here is an example:
Apple gets its groove on and creates a cheap WiFi appliance that supports all of the 802.11 standards. I set it up in my house (or apartment or car or motor home — some place with access to electricity) and theoretically I’ve created a “hotspot” with a 150 foot radius, which means any 802.11-compliant device that comes within that zone can now access whatever that Apple WiFi appliance is connected to. That could mean a regular land-line (DSL, cable modem, etc.) and/or other WiFi devices. If my neighbors have a similar WiFi appliance and their neighbors and so on down the block, we could all connect to one another and have access to oodles of information (depending on permissions) without having to use a land-line.
Now imagine multiple neighborhoods having these appliances, connecting one neighborhood to the next and then the whole city and even the entire metroplex. That is entirely possible and will most probably happen within the next 4-5 years without enthusiasts like myself promoting this possibility. In addition to having stationary appliances in the homes of Joe Blow, any appliance that is compliant with these standards can transmit, piggyback and transport data, linking not only their calls but neighborhoods to one another (ex: some street intersections are wider than 150 feet, so someone that drives down the road and uses a WiFi enabled cellphone or PDA would link the neighborhoods temporarily and to other drivers).
That is looking at the ceteris paribus (all things staying constant) situation. The future of WiFi is actually even more exciting in that, bigger and better standards are in the works to broaden both the bandwidth pipe (to anywhere between 2 and 155 Mbps - 801.16.1) as well as transmission radius (hundreds of meters and even kilometers - 802.16).
In fact, the future is already here for some lucky individuals. I shot an email off to Australia?s own WiFi expert, Richard Giles, with a link to the LanLinkup article and he replied stating that he uses WiFi to connect to the net: I have a wavelan connection (via a yagi antenna) to a friend’s house about 200m away. He then connects to another friend 500m away using 802.11, who then connects to an ISP in the city about 1km away.
Mr. Giles pointed out that Perth (the largest isolated city in Australia) has a “freenet” around the city — if you look at the map you can see the “hot spots.” Similarly, San Francisco and New York City are in the news often as places for “war chalking” in which geeks go around the block marking hotspots with chalk. Here is the “node” map for Dallas (map of hotspots). As you can tell, most of the WiFi areas are currently in and around cell phone towers off the major streets and highways.
You might be wondering “is this a new Internet?” In a way, yes it is. However, if those implementing the hotspots follow various future-proof standards (like IPv6) and allow for backwards compatibility with existing network-access points, then it?s all good. And remember, some of the WiFi appliances have the ability to connect to the “regular” internet as well, via land-line. So, just you can view the Wireless Internet as a way of accessing old information as well.
This new “wireless” internet can now empower individuals with cheaper, freer access to information, just as blogging has and will continue to revolutionize publishing and disseminating information. Decentralization baby, it’s the wave of the future (peer-to-peer networks are a great example too). Of course, the true litmus test that will indicate if this is truly a revolutionary idea: a politician tries to regulate it and/or the RIAA threatens to sue you.
Now if only the Semantic Web would deploy this easily…