what day is today? it's wifi's birthday

[sfx2000]

Pretty cool article... Just to share some thoughts...

802.11 - unified a number of wireless technologies on a common MAC that could integrate into 802 based LAN's...

802.11b - made wireless LAN technology accessible to many folks in a common, inter-operable specification

802.11a - OFDM in 5Ghz, and this was backported to 802.11g, which was huge...

802.11n - standardized MIMO, channel aggregation, frame aggregation, added many things - some good, some not so good (e.g. Wide Channels in 2.4GHz) - added enhancements like STBC's and LDPC's

802.11ac - cleaned up the 11n mess in some regards in 5GHz at least, removed greenfield modes - improving legacy support, much wider channels, standardized beamforming in Wave 1 - enabled additional features...

802.11, IMHO, is a huge contributor to overall global productivity and use...

Best wishes to the IEEE 802.11 WG and all their contributors...

 

[System Error Message]

wheres the cake.

 

[sfx2000]

Here ya go, with all the OFDM sub-carriers, lol...

 

[sfx2000]

802.11 - unified a number of wireless technologies on a common MAC that could integrate into 802 based LAN's...

And for what it's worth - going into Geezer mode...

Scott Gruby was a Mac developer on Eudora over at Qualcomm - same time I was there - Scott was also a Newton (early PDA) developer, and I was basically interested in wireless... this would be back in '96 or so - Scott wrote Eudora for Newton, and I inherited a MessagePad 130 with a Wavelan card - this is before I got involved with Qualcomm's IS-95 CDMA 2G effort...

WaveLAN at the time, it wasn't 802 standard at all... but seeing the power of getting email in the palm of ones hand, that convinced me that wireless, back in '96 was a career path worth choosing - so I jumped in with both feet...

Newton (Apple) was the means, but the Lucent WaveLAN was the end - and this was part of a joined effort with teh CDMA group to push IS99 data services (IS99 was asynch dialup) and IS-657 Packet Data - eventually this was collapsed into IS707 for 3G CDMA... while the developers at the low-level worked on IS707, I joined the PalmOS team that developed the Qualcomm PDQ, e.g. the clown-shoe, which was the first CDMA SmartPhone...

Anyways, over the past 20 years or so - I've been doing a lot of stuff... from the very early days, to exploring dead-ends (SDMA, UWB, Wimax, etc...), it's been a damn good run...

But 802.11 - I've always appreciated it, and this is a technology that all here can appreciate...

 

[System Error Message]

we all use it and appreciate it, its too bad some manufacturers dont properly implement it and the laws of different countries that restricts channels. Every new wifi standard released with higher prices.

 

[sfx2000]

we all use it and appreciate it, its too bad some manufacturers dont properly implement it and the laws of different countries that restricts channels. Every new wifi standard released with higher prices.

Well - when we look at the various technologies that in the fondle slab in one's hands, which 60 to 70 percent of the the world accesses the internet...

Mad props to all the HW/SW engineers across all vendors to make this happen in the 802.11 space, and being open to other 802.* members to jump in and contribute..

I'm a recovering member of 802.16e/m - and 802.20/21/22, which most folks might not recognize..

 

[stevech]

I'm a recovering member of 802.16e/m - and 802.20/21/22, which most folks might not recognize..

Hey! I worked on 802.16e's channel models - while a contractor to Sprint Labs in the pre-LTE days of "adaptive channel equalizers (wireless DOCSIS)" versus OFDM. I learned a LOT as we built/ran a lab and did field trials, to test pre-production gear for the two approaches. Cisco was in this too, as was Stanford Univ. and Gigabit wireless and several others. Using the re-purposed MMDS spectrum at 2.5GHz.
This was for fixed wireless... a now defunct market.
Ultimately, Verizon and other incumbents prevailed. Made sense then.
Well, it paid the bills for a year.