Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Intel Demonstrates Light Peak Connectivity Standard Running on Laptop
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Wireless is slow. Wireless will always be slow. It is physically impossible to make wireless fast. To speed up wireless, more bandwidth is needed, so either you are limited to ~5 m range, or your router starts screwing with next doors. On the other hand, you can increase the frequency at which you transmit. But then you start getting into microwave frequencies that cook people, which is pretty bad.
Fibre has neither of these problems, as if you need more speed you can either run another line, or increase your transmission frequency. And seeing as glass is transparent right up from infra red through the visible spectrum, that's not a problem. Or, you can use that huge IR-UV bandwidth to transmit a tremendous amount of data in parallel down the one fibre.
Actually there might be some opportunities to use power lines as antennas in the future.
At least indoors it is pretty hard to be more than 2 meters away from a powerline.
http://www.corridor.biz/technology.htm
http://www.computingunplugged.com/issues/issue200608/00001829001.html
Well, I really wouldn't call this wireless, seeing as it's transmitted down powerlines.
Other than the fact that this is not really relevant to the argument of home wireless systems versus light peak, as this BPL thing is data transfer to the home, not data transfer throughout the home, which is what light peak is.
Um ain't you the new guy from Apple, that make the innovation pace slow ?
Wireless will sooner or later be faster or at least be fast enough to replace wires.
At least for simple bluetooth or low range devices in the houses or offices could benefit from wireless for reasonnable data transmission: Headset, Iphone Sync, Mobile Drive, Wacom tablet...
Or maybe you don't even use Wifi and you're connected through ethernet ? If that's the case, I understand you're answer..
Wireless will sooner or later be faster or at least be fast enough to replace wires.
At least for simple bluetooth or low range devices in the houses or offices could benefit from wireless for reasonnable data transmission: Headset, Iphone Sync, Mobile Drive, Wacom tablet...
Or maybe you don't even use Wifi and you're connected through ethernet ? If that's the case, I understand you're answer..
Wireless is a security risk.
You cannot break into a fibre optic cable and steal data which is why Fibre Channel is popular in the enterprise.
I don't even know why someone chose to derail this thread with delusions of fast Wireless everywhere. Undoubtedly it's being worked on but Wireless will always overpromise and underdeliver.
I'll be happily using Light Peak in a couple of years while people wait for the next great Wireless hype job.
You cannot break into a fibre optic cable and steal data which is why Fibre Channel is popular in the enterprise.
I don't even know why someone chose to derail this thread with delusions of fast Wireless everywhere. Undoubtedly it's being worked on but Wireless will always overpromise and underdeliver.
I'll be happily using Light Peak in a couple of years while people wait for the next great Wireless hype job.
You might know that every cable turns to antenna in multi-MHz-area.
Check it out:
http://www.corridor.biz/FullArticle.pdf
page 26
http://www.corridor.biz/iwpc.pdf
page 24
Although the idea there is to use power lines as cell network antennas,
there's no reason why this wouldn't work inside the home also.
At home you can be far from your wlan-router, but you are always near power line.
I would have also been happily using eSata for the last 5 years, but Macs seems to be locked to decade old tech's speeds (fw & usb2).
Roadmap should be now:
2010 usb3 (market saturated in 2013)
2012 LP
2015-2020 some magical multi-Gbps-wireless UWB like E-Line etc.
Right...
Yes, I use Wi-Fi. I think it's great, just because it's versatile. It will always be there for slow and easy data transfer.
But people don't seem to understand that wireless is NEVER going to become faster than optical telecommunications. Electrical works differently, so the answer isn't so clear cut, but the answer is still almost certainly no.
So unless you have line of sight between two devices and can put up with extremely bright lights in your room which chew up a lot of power, wireless is limited to radio and microwave frequencies. This means the maximum possible bandwidth is VERY SMALL. Optical communications ranges right through infra red and visible, and the bandwidth is HUGE.
Electrical connections have similar frequency ranges to wireless, but clearly running more wires through the same cord is pretty trivial. And there is no interference between different wires, unlike wireless.
So in summary, Wireless will NEVER be as fast as either electrical or optical wired networks. It is impossible on both a physics and practicality basis.
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2010/05/next-gen-gigabit-wireless-spec-formalized.ars
Next-gen gigabit wireless spec formalized with 7Gbps speeds
oops
Perhaps for the consumer AVCHD cameras but not for any Professional use other than bulk data transfer.
In the way it is advertised, it should easily handle fullHD proRes HQ.
If you need to feed multiple workstations or uncompressed hd, you'd anyway need SAN to do that over network and then the price of network itself becames irrelevant.
But it might also be that there's a real caveat in this wireless-gig; 60 GHz is pretty tricky:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_USB#Wireless_USB_vs._60_GHz
Maybe beam forming can help a bit, but if bandwidth drops when somebody walks across the room, lower frequencies might work better.
Anyway, today usb3 is faster and cheaper per bps than any connection in any Mac. But hey, we got all the time in the world to wait for light to peak...
Light Peak on MacBook
As a response to ThomasJL thread about USB 3.0, I made this thread.
Do you think Apple will somehow implement Light Peak on her notebooks?
And when will it be added?
As a response to ThomasJL thread about USB 3.0, I made this thread.
Do you think Apple will somehow implement Light Peak on her notebooks?
And when will it be added?
Mass production will start H2 this year so seeing that it's Intel's, they'll likely integrate it into Sandy Bridge chipsets meaning that we might see it in 2011 but that's up to Apple and Intel
Mass production doesn't necessarily mean mass adoption. If it's not in every cheap pc, price per port will be high.