WiFi in trouble?

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Posted:
in General Discussion edited January 2014
WiFi may be in trouble. It looks like Intel and Cisco are out to take it over, all for themselves. Here is a link to the story.



http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/69/31866.html



Companies out to grab monopoly control of a market develop "Private" Standards. If successful, the market conforms to the standard and every other company is out in the cold. Cisco has such a standard it seems, the Cisco Client Extensions, or CCX. Now Intel and Linksys (Cisco) are partners. What the future seems to hold, if they get their way, is that Intel builds CCX into Intel Processors and only Cisco, and its subsidiary Linksys, are allowed to build access points with CCX technology.



Possibly the only way to stop them is to develop a competing standard to CCX that everyone is free to use. However, there may be no hope that a committee like the WiFi Alliance can do so in time. Just two companies bent on taking over an industry, like Cisco and Intel, can move much faster than a committee. Look how Intel was able to get USB 2.0 to market so much faster than FireWire 800.

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 5
    dfilerdfiler Posts: 3,420member
    I don't think the market will adopt any new wireless networking standards soon. For WAN communication, it will be at least a decade before 802.11b becomes the bottleneck. For LAN traffic, wifi is a bottleneck, but not an issue for almost everything but video file transfers.



    Even 11MB wifi is more than fast enough for home use and nearly all business applications. In the short term, the only way to unseat wifi would be to make another, backward compatible but competing standard.
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  • Reply 2 of 5
    snoopysnoopy Posts: 1,901member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by dfiler

    I don't think the market will adopt any new wireless networking standards soon. . .







    What you say is true, but that is not the point of the article. What Intel and Cisco are planning to do is to make in much easier for those who use the WiFi standard. These are extensions to the standard so to speak, but only Intel and Cisco equipment will be able to use them. Users will adopt the Intel and Cisco approach because it makes life easier for them. So to get the best and easiest WiFi, you will need to use Linksys wireless routers and access points and Intel Centrino mobile technology.



    Maybe this is a little like what Microsoft tried to do with Java. By adding their own extensions to it, Microsoft would have in effect taken over control of Java. It would have been Microsoft modified Java that was used. This case may be different enough, where these extensions are not altering the original WiFi standard.
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  • Reply 3 of 5
    dfilerdfiler Posts: 3,420member
    You're right. My first reading of the article gave me the impression they were announcing a new hardware software combo. Now, after a second reading, it seems like they're just talking about... well, actually... hmmm. It seems like this press release is only pure advertising for an existing technology.



    Let me get this straight. We should look to intel and cisco to simply our lives by making existing products more user friendly?



    They're basically saying they're going to work together to make wireless networking simpler. But wait, we already don't need to install 'drivers'. The only thing left to simplify is access-point security. If not based on MACs, then aren't we talking about password protection? Seems like a pretty known domain. Everything else like encryption schema is well below the level of user interaction.



    If they really wanted to do something revolutionary... zero-config port-forwarding for home and small business LANs
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  • Reply 4 of 5
    wmfwmf Posts: 1,164member
    No one is in trouble. All the wireless chip makers have already licensed CCX and Apple already supports LEAP. And the standard competitor to LEAP is already here: WPA.
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