Wireless Infrastructure Standards Update

 

Editor’s Note: One of the methodologies used to gain insight in technological developments, is to look at seemingly disparate events and determine if there is any potential linkage between them. The following three events/developments address different aspects of wireless technology infrastructure.

802.11n Certification

• The Wi-Fi Alliance has started certifying fully compliant 802.11n devices, along with new optional elements, and is graduating from the Draft N trademark and testing to plain N, with updates to logos and processes. The Alliance has added four additional optional certifications for a third spatial stream, better 2.4GHz coexistence, space-time block coding and packet aggregation. The biggest change in this certification update is three-stream N, which will allow raw data rates of 450Mbps, along with the potential to address three mo-bile devices using single-stream 802.11n at one time.

EU’s GPS augmentation system paves way for Galileo

• The GPS satellite positioning system is becoming so universal that it is easy to forget that several other standards are in the making – many driven by the desire of the European Union, Russia and China not to let the US dominate this global system. The European Commission is working on a fully fledged alternative to GPS, Galileo, due to launch in 2014, but in the meantime has gone live this week with Egnos, a free satellite system that claims more precise navigation than GPS.
• Egnos (European Geostationary Navigation Overlay Service), is an augmentation service rather than a full satellite positioning system (that will be Galileo) but it is now open for public use. Its signals are transmitted through three geosynchronous satellites, though these are not dedicated to its use – two belong to the Inmarsat fleet, and the other is the Artemis satellite, jointly operated by the EU and Japan.

Seacom undersea cable will enable host of African WiMAX launches

• The potential of sub-Saharan Africa for wireless broadband is clear – low penetration rates, difficult terrains and cost structures for wireline build-out, rapidly growing economies in many areas. But one of the key reasons for relatively slow progress has been the shortage of internet capacity, an issue that is being addressed to some extent by a massive undersea fiber optic cable project run by Seacom. This will reduce dependence on expensive satellite and enhance the business models of hundreds of operators in southern and east Africa.

Editor’s Note – linkage exists between these three as follows:

• While they are dealing with different technological components (Wireless transmission, GPS and Internet Access), they all deal with various aspects of wireless infrastructure;
• There is a lot of interest in wireless internet access;
• Where there is a will, there is a way (undersea cables, satellites, etc.).