Month: December 2002

Wi-Fi News has an in-depth report by Ken Berger on the recent MicroVentures conference on opportunities in the semiconductor industry. These conferences used to be annual affairs, but this is the first one in a decade (on chips). Glenn believes this, combined with Brian Meckler’s 802.11 Planet conference, is a sure sign that wireless is hot right now. Of course it is, but you couldn’t prove it by the exhibits at 802.11 Planet, which were just sad – about 20 companies, most with cafeteria tables for booths, pitching obscure test equipment and software, and a couple of larger booths run by companies like Boingo with dubious business plans.

But wireless is hot, and the VCs are still funding lots of companies in this sector, including chip companies with good stories to tell. I was especially intrigued by remarks from a couple of CEOs on motherboard implementations of 802.11:

Rich Redelfs of Atheros and Greg Raleigh of Airgo both countered that this could be a problem– a motherboard manufacturer would have serious problems keeping up with all the innovation that is surely coming in WLAN, and this part can literally choke a Pentium with what’s going to be happening.

Either somebody’s not tracking the discussion very well, or they’re protecting their interests with a bit of misdirection. In the first place, the 802.11 MAC is a very stable standard, one that hasn’t been significantly altered in years (unlike modem standards, which changed every year for a decade), so the coming innovation doesn’t any more indict motherboard implementations that it does NICs. And in the second place, the Pentium has nothing to do with it, because the typical 802.11 implementations on the market already rely on the Pentium, and don’t even have a microprocessor on the NIC. And in the third place, serializer and RF logic can be upgraded just as easily for a motherboard vendor as a NIC vendor – you use firmware, a dongle, or a socket, as you please. A motherboard vendor can incorporate this in the BIOS, and there’s already a nice clean path to upgrade that for all popular motherboards.

Other than cost, the motherboard implementations will win in most cases (pun intended) because the vendor can build an antenna that uses the entire case, and not just a tiny footprint on the NIC. These are big advantages. So Redelfs and Raleigh are blowing smoke, and one of them knows it. (full disclosure: I used to work for Airgo, and turned down a job at Atheros, where some of my ole buds from 3Com still work.)

Berger singles out one company that’s doing smart things with wireless:

ChipWrights focuses on low power chips for handheld devices and could be the next Nvidia in graphics controllers.

Aside from damning with faint praise, he’s right – low power consumption is the sine qua non for good, high-volume wireless chips these days. More elaborate implementations – like Vivato’s – are strictly for the Access Point market.

Vivato’s an interesting company, BTW – their CEO, Ken Biba, was the enfant terrible at Sytek during their glory years as the supplier of IBM’s PC Network (a broadband, 2Mbps version of Ethernet that was the first implementation of NetBIOS). Biba also ran Xircom, now an Intel property, so he’s been around. Greg Ennis, tech director of the WiFi Alliance, was also at Sytek in the Biba days, where he lead the unsuccessful attempt to get IEEE 802.3 endorsement for PC Network (they went with twisted-pair instead). Networking is still a small industry.

Senators George Allen (R. AOL) and Barbara Boxer (D, Intel) have written a bill that would require the FCC to set aside a large chunk of spectrum for unlicensed packet radio use, in the name of kick-starting broadband across the nation. Initial commentary ranges from neutral (Dan Gillmor) to concerned (Glenn Fleischman). (This reminds me: do you know what Barbara Boxer has in common with Trent Lott? They were both college cheerleaders. So it’s no wonder Boxer is co-sponsoring a bill by a football tycoon. But seriously…)

I don’t have the inside dope on this bill – that will have to come from somebody with some time to do the research – but it wouldn’t surprise me if AOL is actually behind it. Their merger with Time-Warner’s been a colossal flop, but there are still people in the company who believe that convergence will validate the merger. But the trouble is, there’s not going to be any real convergence until there’s more broadband to the home, and broadband has been fairly well languishing these last few years as telecoms and cable companies reel with the after-effects of the bubble. Wireless broadband would take these companies out of the picture, or so the story goes, and that would be like all cool and stuff.

It’s a desperation move, in other words. Wireless is a pretty horrible way to do networking for more than a few feet inside a building. If it were to be adapted to networking entire neighborhoods, we’d need a lot better mechanisms for sharing spectrum and ensuring security than we have now in WiFi, and we’d have to have network cops to enforce the rules better than we do now, which is to say, not at all. So it’s premature to allocate bandwidth for unknown services which may or may not be efficient, because they’re not currently defined.

A better approach would be sense of the Congress resolution requesting the FCC to write a report on the feasibility of wireless broadband, highlighting the technical issues, the enforcement issues, and any licensing issues that might be relevant. This should lead to an FCC position endorsing a particular IEEE or ISO standard for use in the allocated spectrum, and rules that go beyond RF signal strength regulation to ensure it’s used properly.

And while the FCC is working on this plan, some bright minds need to scheme up some ways to light up some of the dark fiber that’s been pulled already, probably with tax incentives for telcos in invest in Digital Loop Carrier equipment.

Wireless is a last-resort technology, and we shouldn’t kid ourselves that it’s anything to use when there’s a wired alternative.

Attractive illusion gets people more excited, temporarily, than hard truth. The pricey Supernova 2002 conference reached out to geeks hankering to make a difference and won some converts in Palo Alto this week. The conference organizer, Kevin Werbach, is a veteran of Esther Dyson’s consulting organization, sponsor of the highly-regarded (and even pricier) PC Forum.

Werbach’s premise is that decentralized communications technology is revolutionizing the way we relate to each other, empowering the individual, spreading democracy (probably ending world hunger, global warming, and the oppression of indigenous peoples), and generally making the world a better place, at least for us geeks. He expressed his theory about networking in an article titled It’s in the Chips for The Feature:

Intel is particularly excited about WiFi and other unlicensed wireless technologies, because that’s where it sees the strongest resonance with its familiar PC industry. Says Kahn: “If you look historically at our industry, one way of looking at it is as a sequence of battles beyond chaotic and orderly things. In almost every instance that I can think of, the chaotic thing won.” The PC beat the mainframe and Ethernet beat centralized LAN protocols. Now, WiFi is challenging top-down wireless data technologies such as 3G. If history is any guide, the messy bottom-up approach will win. In addition to building WiFi chips and devices, Intel is lobbying the US government to provide more flexibility and spectrum for unlicensed wireless technologies. (emphasis added)

There’s only one thing wrong with Werbach’s model: it’s complete nonsense. The PC didn’t beat the mainframe, it beat the dumb terminal. There are more mainframes now than ever before, but we call them web servers. The PC isn’t the product of decentralization, its the product of miniaturization, which actually packs circuits together in a more centralized form. This allows PCs to do more than terminals, and some of what they do is to request more services from central servers. Corporate computing topology is as it ever was, only more densely so.

Ethernet beat the IBM Token Ring, Datapoint ArcNet, and Corvus Omninet primarily because it was faster, more open, and more cost efficient on a dollars per bandwidth unit basis. It was actually much more centralized than the alternatives, and in fact didn’t really take off until it became more centralized than it was in its original form.

Early Ethernet – the network specified in the Blue Book by DEC, Intel, and Xerox, and then slightly modified by the IEEE 802.3 committee – was a highly decentralized network in which computers were connected to each other by a big, fat, coaxial cable. This topology was supposed to be highly reliable and easily extendable, but it proved to be a nightmare to install, configure, and manage. So Ethernet languished until the 1BASE5 task force of IEEE 802.3 wrote a standard for a variation of Ethernet using twisted pair wiring to connect computers to a centralized piece of electronics called an “active hub”. I know because I’m one of the people who wrote this standard.

Token Ring and ArcNet already used passive hubs, but these devices didn’t have processors and couldn’t perform signal restoration and network management. By centralizing these functions, twisted pair Ethernet lowered overall network deployment costs and made a more robust network, one in which meaningful troubleshooting and bandwidth management could be performed efficiently by skilled network technicians.

When wireless LANs were first developed, in the early 90s, there were those who tried to build completely decentralized systems where computers send messages directly to each other without a hub mediating traffic. These systems also turned out to be nightmares to operate, and were replaced by systems in which computers congregate around active hubs again, although they were renamed “access points”. If you use a wireless LAN today, you have an access point (the ad hoc version of 802.11, iBBS, simply allows one computer to serve as an access point for the others).

These networks are managed top-down, just as 3G networks are. The difference is that 802.11 has minimal capabilities for traffic shaping, priority assignment, security, and management, all the things that a large, massively distributed network needs to do. Lacking this intelligence, they aren’t going to scale up as well as entrepreneurs active in building out semi-public networks through hotspots need them to in order to live up to the claims they’re making.

802.11 isn’t a sound basis for building a global, wireless network, and it was never intended to be. It’s a lightweight network with minimal overhead intended to fill one floor of an office building at most, and I know this because I was one of the people who laid out the MAC protocol framework on which it’s based. It’s a testament to the ingenuity of RF hardware engineers that it can now go farther and faster than we ever imagined it would, back in the day.

A survey reported by Glenn Fleishman in the New York Times reports that 70% of the 802.11 WLANs in New York are completely insecure, not even using the marginal security included in the basic specs. That’s only the beginning of the problems.

The much larger issue is bandwidth management, when you start cramming more and more networks together, each of which is separately managed, and all of which have to share the same handful of communications channels, which they do in an extremely inelegant, first-come-first-served fashion.

It’s going to be as if all the private telephones are removed from our homes and offices, and we have to line up at a few pay phones to make a call, often waiting behind people who never stop talking. Basically, the system will implode as soon as a certain density of access points is reached.

In order to manage spectrum, and I mean to manage it in such a way that everyone can access it on a fair and reasonable basis, access has to be controlled, bandwidth has to be allocated, hogs have to be disconnected, and broken computers have to be isolated and repaired. This means centralization, and no amount of hand-waving will make it otherwise.

It’s annoying that a whole new generation of snake oil peddlers are trying to pick up where the Dot Com bubble left off and over-hype 802.11 the same way they did Internet commerce. I hope this time around investors will hang on to their wallets and demand profit potential out of their business models, fraud will be punished, and genuine innovations won’t be crowded out by scams.

UPDATE: In a more recent essay (via Lotus Notes creator Ray Ozzie), Werbach tempers his view of decentralization:

The most decentralized system doesn’t always win. The challenge is to find the equilibrium points–the optimum group sizes, the viable models and the appropriate social compromises.

This is almost there. Certain things lend themselves to decentralization, such as CPU cycles, user interfaces, and access to networks; other things don’t, such as databases of time-critical information, security, and spectrum management. We create decentralized systems where they’re appropriate, and centralized ones where they’re appropriate. This isn’t new, and there’s nothing in the new technologies to suggest otherwise. We may very well need a “new paradigm” to lead networking out of its current slump, but decentralization isn’t it. What it might be is a topic that I’ll discuss shortly.

Seeing this at inappropriate response:

Many Snappy Returns. A rousing albeit belated Happy Blirgday to Dr. Frank. The one true frabjous original real blogs o’ war. Accept no substitutes.

reminded me that I’m chapped at this John Little character who stole the name of Dr. Frank’s blog and registered it as a domain, which he now uses for his own blog (not linked here on principle.) The blog itself isn’t offensive, but stealing the name “Blogs of War” is. Little, having benefitted from stealing Dr. Frank’s name, should now give it to him and go get his own. This kind of behavior is not acceptable, and it gives War Bloggers a bad name.

BTW, happy birthday, Dr.