future of WIFI?

[slipper]

do you guys and gals ever think the future of WIFI will be similar to cellular phone service?

 

[alxths]

I think people stealing signals would be a big hurdle to cross with making that a reality. And moreso, how often do you feel the need to use the internet outside of home, school, office or a coffee shop?

 

[slipper]

i dont think so. im not very familiar with the engineering of cellular and WIFI but they are similar corect? if what you stated was true, i could buy a cell phone and use anyones cellular service. it shouldnt be very expensive because police officers (at least here in hawaii) use some sort of wireless service to communicate between each individual laptop in each police car. it should be somewhat easily available for consumers without needing to develop some additional major network.

 

[crazzyeddie]

I think that Wifi will become more widespread, but will not be everywhere (for instance on the highway or suburb areas) but i can definitely see it blanketing a large city, like New York: sit in any outdoor café, on the bus, walking down the sidewalk (pda) and have a 2.5mbps+ internet connection with a city-wide wireless plan (thru t-mobile or someone). And when youre somewhere else, like on the highway, you can use a 250kbps connection through a cell phone.

On the issue of stealing a net connection, this is prevented through only letting one ethernet address connect per account (every ethernet or wireless card has a unique built in address). Some DSL companies currently use this, although it is now become less frequent (it was normal for DSL when it first came out).

 

[jeff.macaddict]

Gigawire.

Apple's pattented a wireless protocol which operates above 3GHz, I don't remember exactly, I think it's more like 5GHz. Way faster than Airport Extreme, more secure.

I got my 12" PB two hours ago!

 

[MattG]

I definitely see being able to go pretty much anywhere and hop on the Internet at high speed. Instead of paying for cable or DSL every month, you'll just pay for "Wireless" that you can use anywhere. Sweeeeeeeet.

 

[chinamac]

Currently we are only looking at a limited range of 30 meters or about 100 feet on 802.11 version of wifi but new technology is now reaching a range of 30 kilometers on wifi! Which means a whole city can be covered with just a few base stations. I think they are testing that in a small town in California already.

At the same time, with CDMA 1X, cell phones can now reach over 200 K per second. But this still does not compare with wifi bandwidth.

Eventually, probably in just 3-4 years, when Voip becomes more of a norm, and extended wifi becomes commercially and technically viable, then it will be wifi based cell phones and all other portable gear running off extended wifi. That day should not be so far away but for the fact that the phone companies would die and are dying to keep it off the market unless and until they are forced to move (such as the turtle speed to Voip right now).

 

[benixau]

I think in 4-5 yrs a new standard will emerge that has the speed of the (then) WiFi but less power drain then BlueTooth chips in devices do today.

This will be the way to go. But of course I could be wrong and we could see:

Airport Extreme Kickass Super Titanium
802.11b/g/n/p/t/v/z compatible
1024Mbps over the air