back to article Samsung: Thought your PIPE was FAT? Check our 4.6 GIGABIT WiFi

Samsung has claimed a serious WiFi breakthrough, saying it has “successfully overcome the barriers to the commercialization of 60GHz millimeter-wave band Wi-Fi technology” and will soon deliver products capable of wireless data transmission at a stonking 4.6 gigabits per second. Samsung's canned statement says previous …

  1. phil dude
    Thumb Up

    end to end latency..?

    Without wires we get c for the media...

    But what is the end to end latency of the electronics? With infiniband squeezing close to 1us, a wireless solution would have the benefit of , well, no wires....;-)

    If there's one things supercomputing needs it is a good broadcast and multi cast patterns, and with many channel wireless, this would be possible...

    Assuming the pipe was big enough for your application...!

    P.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Not for Fanbois.

    Just for the giggles, don't licence it to Apple..

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Not for Fanbois.

      It can't be accepted as a standard by IEEE if isn't freely licensed, and it would be just another "S-beam" type technology that only appears in Samsung products.

      Not sure what the point of gigabit wireless is when you still have broadband measured in megabits.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Not for Fanbois.

        "Not sure what the point of gigabit wireless is"

        Currently sat here waiting for some movies and music to copy from my file server to my tablet before I go on my jollies... Right now I can see a point. :-)

        1. MrXavia

          Re: Not for Fanbois.

          But the spinning rust can barely keep up..

          I have a 1Gbps LAN at home, its not the LAN that slows up data transfer, its the spinning rust...

          1. petur
            Go

            Re: Not for Fanbois.

            Get proper gear then... My (QNAP) NAS with SSD is very happy to fully saturate my gigabit network... You can argue about the cost, though prices of 1TB SSD have come down considerably, and you don't need to put everything on SSD either, only the stuff you want fast.

      2. VinceH

        Re: Not for Fanbois.

        "Not sure what the point of gigabit wireless is when you still have broadband measured in megabits."

        A comment that immediately makes me think of certain members of my family who seem to believe that if "the internet" isn't working, their computers are useless.

        It doesn't really matter if the broadband can't keep up - faster data transfer around a LAN will be useful to some.

        1. Nigel 11

          Re: Not for Fanbois.

          Probably relevant: broadband in South Korea is way ahead of the rest of the world.

          http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_South_Korea

          "It is important to note that 100 Mbit/s services are the average standard in urban South Korean homes and the country is rapidly rolling out 1Gbit/s connections or 1,000 Mbit/s, at $20 per month,[12] which is roughly 263 times faster than the world average and 100 times faster than the average speed in the United States.[13]"

          1. Charles 9

            Re: Not for Fanbois.

            "Probably relevant: broadband in South Korea is way ahead of the rest of the world."

            Probably also relevant: South Korea is SMALL, about the size of the US state of Illinois. Meanwhile, Japan's about the size of California. Geography matters when it comes to wiring up: the smaller, the easier. Not to mention the US has tons of rural area between its two coasts. Between that, the mountains, big rivers, etc. I'd call it a small miracle we can do high-speed links from coast to coast. Know any other nation comparable in size to the US that's doing better across the board?

            1. Khaptain Silver badge

              Re: Not for Fanbois.

              >Know any other nation comparable in size to the US that's doing better across the board?

              Europe is not so bad if you consider it a nation.

              1. Charles 9

                Re: Not for Fanbois.

                "Europe is not so bad if you consider it a nation."

                It's still considerably denser than the US. Key cities in Europe tend to be more evenly distributed. The geopolitical structure of Europe not only helps this but also affects the economics of wiring up, since each country only has to deal with its respective areas and don't necessarily have to agree with the neighbors.

                I'd be very interested in an Internet distribution map of countries like Canada, China, and Russia (these are single countries comparable to the US in land mass). Based on what I've read so far, though, they too have their faults: particularly lopsidedness.

            2. Nigel 11

              Re: Not for Fanbois.

              Looking at that the other way around: I live is a city-(non)state far smaller than Illinois though with a goodly fraction of the same population. (It's called London). Why can't I have gigabit networking to my house for UD$20/month?

              Yes, if one lives in a rural location, one must adjust one's expectations. Isn't this one of the reasons why we have cities at all? The same rule applies to public transport, supply of fuel (town gas), removal of sewage (metropolitan drains vs. septic tanks), lots of other things.

              1. Nigel 11

                Re: Not for Fanbois.

                I just looked it up and it's worse than I thought. South Korea is only slightly smaller than the whole of England! (100,000 km^2 vs 130,000km^2). So the rest of England can be just as annoyed.

                1. Michael Duke

                  Re: Not for Fanbois.

                  Also driving the low price is last time I checked about 80-90% of traffic never leaves the nation.

                  Compare that to NZ where I live and approx. 60% of traffic is international.

              2. Charles 9

                Re: Not for Fanbois.

                "Looking at that the other way around: I live is a city-(non)state far smaller than Illinois though with a goodly fraction of the same population. (It's called London). Why can't I have gigabit networking to my house for UD$20/month?"

                Simple. You live in an OLD city. South Korea's infrastructure is pretty modern: its age measured in decades, while good old London has infrastructure dating back centuries (yes, some of it got bombed and subject to fires, but a lot of the stuff, especially underground, survived). And if there's one thing New York and London have in common, it's that it's hard putting up new infrastructure when old stuff's in the way.

                Put simply. Infrastructure is much easier to install in a new city (or one forced to rebuild due to war or disaster) than in an old city.

          2. slightly-pedantic

            Re: Not for Fanbois.

            Last time I looked at the Akamai data the S.Korean average speeds were still the highest, but still around 49% of connections were sub 10 Mbp. Averages can be deceptive.

            1. phil dude
              Boffin

              Re: Not for Fanbois.

              An average means nothing without knowing the variance.

              Makes it easy to ignore news stories that don't follow this simple requirement.

              P.

  3. Rabbit80

    Useless without the range

    Range and signal crowding are always an issue with WiFi - I would much rather see a WiFi router that can push 200Mbps through my walls without interference than a 4.6Gbps router that I have to be within 2 ft of. The 2.4 GHz band is crowded where I live and the 5 GHz band is too weak a signal to be useful outside of the same room the router lives in.

    1. Nigel 11

      Re: Useless without the range

      Depends on price, surely.

      I'd like this if it were so cheap that it could replace wired GbE hubs (circa £20 per room). One less wiring tangle.

      Ideally the base stations would be so cheap that they could be integrated into light fittings, one per room. Or, retrofitted into wired-network wallboxes. They'd need to have nice cellular behaviour for this to work on large open-plan areas.

      In a new building that wasn't already loaded up with Cat-5e outlets and 24-port switches in wiring closets, it could save money even if considerably more expensive, because only one wire per room or room-sized area, instead of ~4-12 of them.

      What's wrong with current wireless, where I work, is insufficient bandwidth. Some of our scientists really do need Gbit networking, even to connect up their personal laptops. A share of a couple of hundred Mbit/s just isn't enough, when a typical dataset is half a gigabyte.

    2. Irongut

      Re: Useless without the range

      "5 GHz band is too weak a signal to be useful outside of the same room"

      Bull.

      I use 5Ghz at home to avoid the congestion from other networks on 2.4Ghz. I live in a Glasgow tenement with thick stone and brick walls. The 5Ghz signal is just as useful as the 2.4Ghz signal at the other end of the flat to the router. My phone can even pick it up and use it to stream music two floors down at ground level while sat in a parked car.

      1. Rabbit80

        Re: Useless without the range

        I think it is because our walls are stuffed with metal.. Reinforcement behind the plaster. Kind of makes the entire flat into a faraday cage!

  4. flibbertigibbet
    Holmes

    Heard of WiGig?

    For those of you who haven't head of WiGig and don't want to go to Wikipedia to look it up, here are it's specs:

    IEEE name: 802.11ad

    Frequency: 60MHz

    Max speed: deliver data transfer rates up to 7 Gbit/s

    How it works: propagate off reflections from walls, ceilings, floors and objects using beamforming built into the WiGig system.

    Sound familiar?

    1. Fred Goldstein

      Re: Heard of WiGig?

      Of course you meant 60 GHz, not 60 MHz.

      We have some 60 GHz point-to-point outdoor microwave links. They're useful for short hops, a km or so. But they're subject to a lot of rain fade. So the received signal strength indication makes a nice rain gauge.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Heard of WiGig?

      Guess the article refers to 802.11ad, not "802.11 ab" as stated

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