Wireless

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.