RE: WLANAHere is the scoop from the wireless world. 802.11 is a reltively "old"
standard and to be honest the IEEE moves very
slow. The Blueetooth SIG group was formed by
companies like Nokia, Ericsson etc because
industry feels they must push the "standards"
rather than wait for the IEEE, ETSI and ITU-T
to recognize new directions.
Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM)
is basically a coding scheme. It is one of the many "turbo codes that academics etc have been
playing with for the past 8 years. Wi-Lan is one
of the first to create a product nased on one of these codes but not the last.
Many companies are also looking at Frequency Domain reciprocal modulation (FDRM) as an alternative to OFDM. In the US the National association of Broadcasters is very interested in
FDRM. All of these are being considered for Local Multipoint Distribution Services (LMDS) which provides wireless ----INTERNET
I know some people in this group are concerned about a "squeeze" play with respect to standards,
I can pretty much assure you that with respect to
modulation techniques this is NOT a long term worry. Why I am so sure, remember these two words
SOFTWARE RADIO.
Within the nest 3-5 years the modulation techniques used will be irrelevant since your mobile device will be able to recogniz that it has roamed into an area that uses OFDM, CDMA,
GSM etc and via Software reprogram its DSP
based front end to change the modulation and
coding techiques to match the network..
Software Radio...it IS on it way thanks to
more and more powerful DSPs being cranked out
at 0.18 um and 0.15 um wafer tecnologies that
now incorporate powerful MIPs or ARM cores.
Software radio will also allow base stations etc to support multiple technolgies. In this arena
the best technology will "win" until a better
algorithm coms along. The beauty is all you have to do is purchase and download the software to your mobile device.
So Wi-Lan's timing is pretty good.
Regards