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"Eventually, most of these connections will likely become wireless." I have my doubts. It takes a lot of effort to enable 10GB/s wireless transmission. The spe

"Eventually, most of these connections will likely become wireless." I have my doubts. It takes a lot of effort to enable 10GB/s wireless transmission. The spectrum is physically constrained by bandwidth, noise and interference, and it becomes evident in wireless. While a fairly cheap piece of ethernet cable and router will enable several Gbit/s (up to 400 Gbit/s soon, that's simple impossible in the 2.4Ghz band due to spectrum and current interference situation. So you need to use a less overcrowded, shorter range band with multiple physical antennas of large size, and you get beautiful monstrosities such as this: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B016EWKQAQ http://www.amazon.com/dp/B016EWKQAQ And the only way up from there (about 10Gbit/s) imo, is to move to other frequencies entirely, and lose many aspects that make wireless convenient, like wall penetration and long range. So I think wireless isn't a very elegant solution for high bandwidth. What would be ideal I think is that every outlet would have a Type-C port that you could plug your device and get both power and high speed internet. Keep WiFi and other wireless technologies low power and low bandwidth (actually improving the interference situation), like browsing, reading remote sensors and controlling appliances -- for things/situations that are meant to be remote, wireless. Note: this was already addressed in some comments here... I'll leave this for my own reference :)

PhasmaFelis 11y ago
> http://www.amazon.com/dp/B016EWKQAQ http://www.amazon.com/dp/B016EWKQAQ Hell with wifi, I just want one of those to hang on my wall as a sci-fi art piece.
nakedrobot2 11y ago
Li-Fi can be extremely high bandwidth. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li-Fi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li-Fi "It is so far measured to be about 100 times faster than some Wi-Fi implementations, reaching speeds of 224 gigabits per second." I know that in practice, my colleague has tried it, and yes, in practice, it can work.
- orik 11y ago
  Only works with line of sight though, not useful or practical when in most line sight situations you could just run a cable anyways, and not have to worry about potential interference.
  - lmm 11y ago
    Seems pretty practical for e.g. a docking station scenario - rather than connecting a cable, just toss your phone on the desk and it connects to your monitor/docking station.
- cyphar 11y ago
  There are multiple problems with LiFi. The most obvious being diffusion and diffraction as well as line of sight (you need a bright light very close to your device). But also LiFi relies on there being essentially zero power fluctuation in the actual lights. This might be possible in a tech demo where the lights were on for 5 minutes, but not for lights that have seen several months of use. Not to mention that the power costs are immense (only a fraction of the power of LiFi is actually spent on data, the rest is actually powering an array of lights).
jrockway 11y ago
Those antennas are just for show. There are plenty of short-range wireless technologies currently under development that use the SHF/EHF bands to send data at very high speeds. There is plenty of bandwidth up at 60GHz. Furthermore, the processing power of affordable chips is very high, so they can control an array of antennas that send the signal exactly where the other end of the connection is (WiFi is starting to do this, and cellular networks have done this for a while). For connecting your hard drive and monitor to a nearby laptop, I think this will work fine. The big "problem" with these bands is that they don't propagate through walls, or even your hand or a sheet of paper. But with beamforming they can go around your hand, so it's not a problem for things like connecting to monitors, in theory. Wall penetration is a big problem for WiFi. WiFi's very limited bandwidth is shared among all stations that can hear each other. When walls block the signal, it's like you're creating a brand new Universe free of other stations and interference, and so you get free bandwidth. This is why corporate AP deployments turn _down_ the power of their access points, so they only cover a small area, thus allowing the system to have more total bandwidth. Ideally the clients would also turn down their transmit power, but they don't because that's bad for benchmarks and reviews, so they kind of ruin this by bleeding their signals intended for the nearby AP into the range where other clients that can't hear that AP are. Fortunately things like beamforming and MU-MIMO are fixing this, by allowing receivers to move a null in their receive antenna system to where the unwanted device is, thus providing isolation from nearby devices and increasing the total bandwidth of the system. We've been promised this for years but it's still in what I think are the early stages. (As for the use case of "I want one WiFi router to cover my whole city!" we're not there yet. You need an AP in every room, with a wired backhaul. Meshing might solve this... but it is also in the very early stages.)
- IshKebab 11y ago
  The antennas are not just for show. Having multiple antennas allows you to increase bandwidth, reliability and range. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIMO https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIMO https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antenna_diversity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antenna_diversity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beamforming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beamforming
josteink 11y ago
> "Eventually, most of these connections will likely become wireless." ... I have my doubts. Eventually. Not tomorrow. Not next year. But it will come. If you include the full quote, it becomes in my opinion clearer what he thinks: > Eventually, most of these connections will likely become wireless, but given the need for power and the expected challenges around delivering wireless power to many devices, it’s clear variations on USB Type-C, particularly Thunderbolt 3.0 and later iterations, will be around for some time to come. While there are physical limitations to what wireless can do, over the last decades we've had groundbreaking research which repeatedly has increased the BW available to wireless systems by orders of magnitudes. Why do you think we've hit the peak now and it can't happen again? > The proliferation of USB Type-C clearly marks the dawn of a great new era of connectivity for our devices, but it may require a bit of homework on your part to fully enjoy it. Fully agreed on this. In my head USB Type-C was ... just USB Type-C until I read this article.
- coldtea 11y ago
  >Eventually. Not tomorrow. Not next year. But it will come. Physics and physical limits don't really change with time.
  - zardo 11y ago
    But naive methods give way to more clever ones.
    - coldtea 11y ago
      Yes, but clever methods can't bypass physical limits either. Sometimes that's just it.
      - zardo 11y ago
        Bypassing limits is exactly what clever solutions do. We can't break physics, but we can use different methods to solve the same problem. Like wires to get into a room, and a lifi or laser network inside of it, or wireless between the rooms with furniture sized antenna. Or, more likely, something far more clever.
gerbilly 11y ago
Wireless, pff. Give me a wire any day. At any given technology stage a wired connection will be faster than wireless. Not to mention you don't have to worry about interference, and losing the signal. If wireless is so great, tell me this, how come wireless routers have wires _inside_ them! :-)

PhasmaFelis 11y ago

> http://www.amazon.com/dp/B016EWKQAQ http://www.amazon.com/dp/B016EWKQAQ Hell with wifi, I just want one of those to hang on my wall as a sci-fi art piece.

nakedrobot2 11y ago

Li-Fi can be extremely high bandwidth. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li-Fi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li-Fi "It is so far measured to be about 100 times faster than some Wi-Fi implementations, reaching speeds of 224 gigabits per second." I know that in practice, my colleague has tried it, and yes, in practice, it can work.

orik 11y ago
Only works with line of sight though, not useful or practical when in most line sight situations you could just run a cable anyways, and not have to worry about potential interference.
- lmm 11y ago
  Seems pretty practical for e.g. a docking station scenario - rather than connecting a cable, just toss your phone on the desk and it connects to your monitor/docking station.
cyphar 11y ago
There are multiple problems with LiFi. The most obvious being diffusion and diffraction as well as line of sight (you need a bright light very close to your device). But also LiFi relies on there being essentially zero power fluctuation in the actual lights. This might be possible in a tech demo where the lights were on for 5 minutes, but not for lights that have seen several months of use. Not to mention that the power costs are immense (only a fraction of the power of LiFi is actually spent on data, the rest is actually powering an array of lights).

jrockway 11y ago

Those antennas are just for show. There are plenty of short-range wireless technologies currently under development that use the SHF/EHF bands to send data at very high speeds. There is plenty of bandwidth up at 60GHz. Furthermore, the processing power of affordable chips is very high, so they can control an array of antennas that send the signal exactly where the other end of the connection is (WiFi is starting to do this, and cellular networks have done this for a while). For connecting your hard drive and monitor to a nearby laptop, I think this will work fine. The big "problem" with these bands is that they don't propagate through walls, or even your hand or a sheet of paper. But with beamforming they can go around your hand, so it's not a problem for things like connecting to monitors, in theory. Wall penetration is a big problem for WiFi. WiFi's very limited bandwidth is shared among all stations that can hear each other. When walls block the signal, it's like you're creating a brand new Universe free of other stations and interference, and so you get free bandwidth. This is why corporate AP deployments turn _down_ the power of their access points, so they only cover a small area, thus allowing the system to have more total bandwidth. Ideally the clients would also turn down their transmit power, but they don't because that's bad for benchmarks and reviews, so they kind of ruin this by bleeding their signals intended for the nearby AP into the range where other clients that can't hear that AP are. Fortunately things like beamforming and MU-MIMO are fixing this, by allowing receivers to move a null in their receive antenna system to where the unwanted device is, thus providing isolation from nearby devices and increasing the total bandwidth of the system. We've been promised this for years but it's still in what I think are the early stages. (As for the use case of "I want one WiFi router to cover my whole city!" we're not there yet. You need an AP in every room, with a wired backhaul. Meshing might solve this... but it is also in the very early stages.)

IshKebab 11y ago
The antennas are not just for show. Having multiple antennas allows you to increase bandwidth, reliability and range. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIMO https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIMO https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antenna_diversity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antenna_diversity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beamforming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beamforming

josteink 11y ago

> "Eventually, most of these connections will likely become wireless." ... I have my doubts. Eventually. Not tomorrow. Not next year. But it will come. If you include the full quote, it becomes in my opinion clearer what he thinks: > Eventually, most of these connections will likely become wireless, but given the need for power and the expected challenges around delivering wireless power to many devices, it’s clear variations on USB Type-C, particularly Thunderbolt 3.0 and later iterations, will be around for some time to come. While there are physical limitations to what wireless can do, over the last decades we've had groundbreaking research which repeatedly has increased the BW available to wireless systems by orders of magnitudes. Why do you think we've hit the peak now and it can't happen again? > The proliferation of USB Type-C clearly marks the dawn of a great new era of connectivity for our devices, but it may require a bit of homework on your part to fully enjoy it. Fully agreed on this. In my head USB Type-C was ... just USB Type-C until I read this article.

coldtea 11y ago
>Eventually. Not tomorrow. Not next year. But it will come. Physics and physical limits don't really change with time.
- zardo 11y ago
  But naive methods give way to more clever ones.
  - coldtea 11y ago
    Yes, but clever methods can't bypass physical limits either. Sometimes that's just it.
    - zardo 11y ago
      Bypassing limits is exactly what clever solutions do. We can't break physics, but we can use different methods to solve the same problem. Like wires to get into a room, and a lifi or laser network inside of it, or wireless between the rooms with furniture sized antenna. Or, more likely, something far more clever.

gerbilly 11y ago

Wireless, pff. Give me a wire any day. At any given technology stage a wired connection will be faster than wireless. Not to mention you don't have to worry about interference, and losing the signal. If wireless is so great, tell me this, how come wireless routers have wires _inside_ them! :-)