How Wi-Fi Almost Didn’t Happen

https://www.wired.com/story/how-wi-fi-almost-didnt-happen

We all love Wi-Fi, except when we can’t connect. We take for granted being able to find wireless access at home, at the office, in an airplane, traveling the globe, or, if we’re so lucky, floating on the International Space Station.

But what if Wi-Fi hadn’t happened? It almost didn’t, at least not in the way we recognize it today.

WIRED OPINION

ABOUT

Jeff Abramowitz was an author of the original IEEE 802.11 standard, and a founder of the Wi-Fi Alliance and has held executive roles in the Wi-Fi industry for 25 years. His oral history of Wi-Fi is chronicled in the Computer History Museum. He is a Principal at A2Z Partners and is writing a book on the early years of Wi-Fi.

Wi-Fi officially launched 20 years ago, on September 15, 1999. You may be imagining a flashy launch event featuring Christina Aguilera (“The wireless genie is out of the bottle!”), or a breathless headline that booted the feared Y2K bug from the front pages. Instead, imagine eight technophiles in an Atlanta Convention Center briefing room waiting to “Superman” their jackets to expose polo shirts bearing the made-up word Wi-Fi before a crowd of 60.

There was no lack of enthusiasm in that room; 17 tech companies big and small had committed to back Wi-Fi, including Apple, Dell, and Nokia. But even the most fervent evangelists (myself included) never imagined the kind of global economic, social, and cultural impact Wi-Fi would have.

By early summer 1999, the wireless world resembled the Wild West. Businesses had largely adopted Ethernet wired networking, which connected desktop computers in “local area networks” at 10 Mbps (Megabits per second). Consumers, sending emails from home, were just getting used to the squealing and squawking sounds of the latest 56 kbps (kilobits per second) dial-up modems. Wireless local area networking (WLAN) products did exist, primarily for businesses, but a multitude of companies offered proprietary solutions that risked rapidly becoming obsolete. The solutions considered an official standard were based on an initial specification known as IEEE 802.11 (the wireless networking group of The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers). These wireless products were five times slower than their wired counterparts and were expensive. In addition, there were different ways to interpret the specification. Vendor “A” could build “standards-compliant” products that weren’t fully compatible with “standards-compliant” products from vendor “B.” These weaknesses in the international specification led companies to support rival technology consortia, each aiming to become a defacto standard.

HomeRF was the biggest and most visible WLAN consortium at the time. The specification was developed by the group of Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Microsoft, Compaq, and IBM; it targeted the consumer market, and was backed by more than 80 other companies. Unlike 802.11 products, HomeRF products communicated with each other, and were considerably cheaper. HomeRF (short for home radio frequency) also had a catchier name than IEEE 802.11, and it had lofty plans for higher speeds and expansion into the business market.

Meanwhile, the second generation of the IEEE standard, 802.11b, was expected to get final approval at the end of September. 3Com, then a leading networking company, had developed products based on this new and faster standard that were slated to ship toward the end of 1999. With the clock ticking, 3Com brought five strong IEEE advocates together to found an independent Wireless Ethernet Compatibility Alliance (WECA), which aimed to ensure that products based on the pending standard would work together. The name “FlankSpeed” was proposed, but they ultimately trademarked the name Wi-Fi—a riff on “Hi-Fi,” or “high-fidelity,” from the era of high-end home stereos—and established the rules by which devices could become “Wi-Fi Certified.”

We all know Wi-Fi won, but there are many ways in which Wi-Fi might not have become ubiquitous, and instead HomeRF remained a competing standard. For one, IEEE 802.11b could have been delayed, which nearly occurred save for a brilliant compromise between two WLAN industry pioneers and foes, Lucent Technologies and Harris Semiconductor. Instead, let’s hypothesize a second scenario where WECA chose to focus on just business connectivity (which was also discussed), not “go-anywhere” connectivity, and “FlankSpeed” was chosen over “Wi-Fi.”

In a FlankSpeed world, workers would have used FlankSpeed at the office and HomeRF at home. It would be more difficult to bring work home with you. Which technology would you look for in a coffee shop or at the airport? Maybe neither. Wait, no public access? NoHO (not home/not office) zones might become no man’s lands for connectivity. Far worse, no FlankSpeed baked into smartphones. Mobility as we know it vanishes into thin air!

Darwinian technology theorists might argue that one group would have eventually won out; a FlankSpeed flotilla might have formed. But having one standard created a singular focus on cost reductions and innovation. Neither an embattled FlankSpeed nor HomeRF could ever have been as cheap, or as pervasive, as Wi-Fi. The lack of a universal standard would have inhibited rollout at places like retail stores and public spaces where we’ve come to expect, even demand, access. Perhaps there would be no streaming video while waiting in line for coffee or no internet connectivity on trains and planes.

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September 12, 2019 at 08:03AM

Epson’s New Short Throw Laser Projector Includes a Special Screen to Bounce Away Overhead Lighting

https://gizmodo.com/epsons-new-short-throw-laser-projector-includes-a-speci-1838038635

Projectors can be a cheaper and far more convenient way to put a gigantic 100+ inch TV in your living room. But to get an image that rivals an LCD or OLED TV, you can’t just point them at a bare wall. So with its new LS500 short-throw 4K laser projector, Epson is including a perfectly-sized ambient light rejecting screen that promises deep blacks and vivid colors.

One of the drawbacks of a projector-based home entertainment center is that you usually need to create some distance between the screen and projector to maximize the image size, which leads to special mounting requirements (often hanging from the ceiling) so that people aren’t constantly blinded by the intense light when walking around the room.

Epson bills the LS500 Laser Projection TV as an all-in-one solution, and it includes a pair of front firing 10-watt stereo speakers.
Photo: Epson

The Epson LS500 is another entry in the increasingly popular series of short-throw projectors featuring a special lens that allows them to be installed right against the wall they’re projecting on, without resulting in a distorted image. It makes installation infinitely easier, there’s never the risk of someone blocking the projector’s beam, and it maximizes the amount of brightness actually hitting the screen.

The screen Epson includes with the LS500 is designed to redirect light from the projector to the viewer, while bouncing light from other sources away.
Illustration: Epson

But as a result of the oblique angle, the light from the projector hits the screen, the image created by short-throw projectors can be easily washed out by overhead lights in a room. Most consumers don’t realize a short-throw projector works best with a specialized screen, so Epson is including one with the LS500 so users have everything they need right out of the box. To the naked eye, it looks like nothing more than a shiny white piece of fabric, but the included screen is actually covered with specially engineered micro ridges that work like tiny lenses to better bounce the light from the projector out into the room while redirecting light from overhead lighting away from the audience.

Depending on their size, these screens can cost well over $2,000 by themselves, so Epson’s new LS500 bundle seems like an especially good deal considering the 100-inch projector and screen combo will cost $4,999, while the 120-inch combo will be $5,999, and both include a pair of 10-watt front-facing speakers so users don’t necessarily need an existing speaker setup. By comparison, a 120-inch TV will cost you well over $10,000, plus installation, plus the cost of a soundbar. But how does Epson get away with selling a 4K short-throw projector and a screen for $5-6K when Sony still wants a staggering $25,000 for its own short-throw 4K solution? You need to read the fine print, specifically what Epson calls “4K PRO-UHD.”

Sony’s 4K projector includes a panel that generates full 4K images, but the panels inside Epson’s 4K PRO-UHD projectors are only HD. To generate a 4K image the projector actually runs at a faster refresh rate and physically shifts the position of each projected pixel diagonally by half-a-pixel to generate an image on a screen that’s double the image resolution of HD. It doesn’t quite match the exact dimensions of a 4K image, but it’s close enough that viewers wouldn’t notice a difference. And Epson claims these projectors automatically do all of the image processing necessary to show a 4K video source properly.

The Epson LS500 Laser Projection TV is available in white or black to help match an existing decor given it sits out in the open.
Photo: Epson

For those obsessed with image quality when it comes to their home theater setups, the clever tricks used by Epson’s 4K PRO-UHD system might be a hard sell. But for those who instead care about having a true movie theater experience at home—or at least the giant screen—Epson’s LS500 Laser Projection TV is currently the cheapest and easiest way to put a 120-inch image on your wall.

via Gizmodo https://gizmodo.com

September 12, 2019 at 02:09AM

SpaceX says it will deploy satellite broadband across US faster than expected

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1567935

An illustration of the Earth, with lines circling the globe to represent a telecommunications network.

SpaceX says it plans to change its satellite launch strategy in a way that will speed up deployment of its Starlink broadband service and has set a new goal of providing broadband in the Southern United States late next year.

In a filing on August 30, SpaceX asked the Federal Communications Commission for permission to “adjust the orbital spacing of its satellites.” With this change, each SpaceX launch would deploy satellites in “three different orbital planes” instead of just one, “accelerating the process of deploying satellites covering a wider service area.”

“This adjustment will accelerate coverage to southern states and US territories, potentially expediting coverage to the southern continental United States by the end of the next hurricane season and reaching other US territories by the following hurricane season,” SpaceX told the FCC. The Atlantic and Pacific hurricane seasons each begin in the spring and run to November 30 each year.

SpaceX said it already planned to “provide continual coverage over northern states after as few as six more launches,” but said it needs a license modification to speed up deployment in the Southern US. SpaceX’s filing stresses the importance of quickly getting service to parts of the US where broadband coverage is limited.

“With this straightforward adjustment, SpaceX can broaden its geographic coverage in the early stages of the constellation’s deployment and enable service initiation to serve customers earlier in the middle latitudes and southern-most states, and critically, those often underserved Americans in Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and the US Virgin Islands,” the company told the FCC.

SpaceX has been somewhat vague about launch dates for its broadband service. In October 2017, SpaceX told a Congressional committee that it would launch at least 800 satellites before offering commercial service and said the commercial service would likely become available in 2020 or 2021, as SpaceNews reported at the time. Last year, Reuters reported that SpaceX’s goal of a 2020 launch was “pretty much on target.” SpaceX CEO Elon Musk had fired some of Starlink’s senior managers in order to stay on schedule.

In its new FCC application, SpaceX said the adjustment in orbital spacing means it would need “fewer launches of satellites—perhaps as few as half—to initiate service to the entire contiguous United States (as well as Hawaii, Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands, American Samoa, and the Northern Mariana Islands).” In the rest of the world, “the modification would enable more rapid coverage of all longitudes to grow toward the Equator, as well as bolstering capacity in areas of greater population density,” SpaceX said.

Unlike traditional satellite broadband, SpaceX’s low-Earth orbit satellites would be able to provide latency as low as 25ms and gigabit speeds. In order to cover any given region, SpaceX said it must “deploy a sufficient number of nodes to ensure continuous coverage,” and “have enough antennas in the right physical configurations to hand off signals.”

No change to altitude or inclination

The orbital-spacing adjustment will not change “the overall number of satellites, their altitude or inclination, their operational characteristics, or their orbital debris implications,” SpaceX said.

If the change is approved, SpaceX satellites would travel in 72 orbital planes instead of the previously approved 24, and there would be 22 satellites in each plane instead of the previously approved 66 in each. This would affect 1,584 out of the 11,943 satellites that SpaceX has FCC authorization to launch. The altitude and inclination would remain unchanged at 550km and 53°, respectively.

An orbital plane is defined by two parameters: the orbiting object’s inclination, and the longitude of its ascending node. I wasn’t sure how to describe this in layman’s terms, so I consulted with our science editor, John Timmer. He explained it this way:

Imagine a spacecraft that orbits so that it’s constantly over the equator. The plane defined by that orbit would cut the earth in half, separating the Northern and Southern Hemisphere. But it’s relatively easy to tilt that plane, so a spacecraft would loop into the northern latitudes for half of its orbit, and into the southern for the other half. By putting a set of spacecraft in enough of these planes, SpaceX plans to greatly expand the areas that can be served by its fleet of satellites.

SpaceX launched 60 satellites in May this year to test the system before preparing for a wider deployment. SpaceX said its “iterative process” led to its new proposal.

“SpaceX has demonstrated the effectiveness of its revolutionary deployment process and confirmed its ability to populate three orbital planes with a single launch,” the company said in its new filing. “By then reorganizing its satellites at their already authorized altitude, SpaceX can place coverage and capacity more evenly and rapidly across more of the US.”

SpaceX also said it plans “to conduct several more Starlink launches before the end of 2019,” and asked the FCC to rule on its application quickly.

The European Space Agency (ESA) this month had to take action to avoid a collision with a SpaceX broadband satellite because a bug in SpaceX’s on-call paging system prevented the company from getting a crucial update about an increased collision risk. But SpaceX said in its FCC filing that the overall collision risk is still near zero “because SpaceX has invested in propulsion for its satellites.”

Other companies planning low-Earth orbit satellites include OneWeb, Space Norway, Telesat, and Amazon. OneWeb recently said it will begin delivering broadband to the Arctic in 2020.

via Ars Technica https://arstechnica.com

September 12, 2019 at 10:48AM

Nintendo Switch’s Weird New Fitness Device Detailed: Ring Fit Adventure Releases Soon

https://www.gamespot.com/articles/nintendo-switchs-weird-new-fitness-device-detailed/1100-6469798/

Nintendo recently teased a "new experience" for Switch. It appeared to be a Wii Fit-like activity game, with accompanying peripherals, but otherwise it was difficult to discern exactly what was going on. Now, the company has shed more light on the peripherals and the game they’re bundled with.

The game is named Ring Fit Adventure, and it is indeed a fitness-oriented adventure game in which you use the new devices, the Ring-Con and the Leg Strap, to control your character. You can jog on the spot to move your character forward, for example, or squeeze the Ring-Con to jump or blast enemies with air.

As well as a story mode, there are mini-games and a quick play mode designed to be easier to hop in and out of, or for you to play with family and friends. You can also tailor the game to your existing fitness level or to train specific muscle groups. Finally, you can turn on Silent Mode, which requires lighter impacts so you don’t wake up the neighbors with your stomping and jumping.

Ring Fit Adventure comes bundled with the Ring-Con and Leg Strap when it launches on October 18. The package costs $80 in the US, with international pricing yet to be revealed.

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September 12, 2019 at 08:27AM