The entire wireless scene, specifically the 802.11x world, has subtly changed in unexpected ways--and now the process has come to a dead end and is going retrograde. At least people are finally getting a clue and securing their connections. Apparently, both the configuration programs and public education have made it so that you will, over time, find fewer and fewer open connections in the wild.
Youll notice this the next time you try to poach a signal from a neighbor. I live on the side of a hill and get signals from at least 20 Wi-Fi transceivers. All of them have security turned on except one, and that one comes up with a splash screen asking for money. If I had done this experiment two years ago, I would have found three or four open access points from my house. Now Ive got nothing. Im beginning to notice this around the country when I travel: The wide-open poachable signals are being buttoned up fast.
But where did all the good Samaritans go--the people who were going to leave their access points open for the good of all mankind?
There are other issues, too. Here are a few additional trends Ive observed regarding Wi-Fi:
1. Less and less talk about faster speeds. Promises were made that wed be coasting on Wi-Fi at speeds near 600 megabits per second by now. Where are they?
2. Continued 802.11n nomenclature issues. Has this standard actually been finalized? What happened?
3. Free municipal Wi-Fi initiatives scuttled left and right due to costs, maintenance, and misplaced idealism.
4. Incredible lack of universal service providers. Its nearly impossible to find one ISP to which you can subscribe and then travel the world using it through peering or other agreements with local providers. One or two come close, but theres always someplace they dont work--and thats the place you end up traveling to.
5. Fixed wireless is becoming more and more of a fiasco, though it seems as if something should work. Its not rocket science.
6. Overpriced service at airports, where Wi-Fi should be free.
7. More confusion as phone companies de-emphasize Wi-Fi in favor of costly cell-phone Internet connections.
It appears that Wi-Fi is now an established and mature technology and therefore unlikely to undergo any radical changes in the years ahead. In other words, things may not get any better.
The only new idea floating around seems to be 802.11y, which is slower, in fact, than current gear. It operates at 54 Mbps on the licensed 3.6-GHz band but allows users to pump out 20 watts. (I wouldnt want to be in the same room with the transmitter, personally.) Right now most 802.11 installations work at well under 1W, with 1W being the legal limit and actually hard to find.
802.11 is not the only wireless technology that seems to have pulled up short. UWB (ultra wideband), a short-range pulse radio technology, has been promising us cordless connectivity in the office for at least a decade--and has delivered nothing. Now we hear about the UWB USB 2.0 connection. Okay, send me one.
WiMAX is another technology howling at the moon with promises of fixed and mobile long-range connections to the net. Im waiting. Sprint Broadband Direct once had a fixed wireless lash-up that it shuttered in anticipation of some sort of solution that doesnt require a line-of-sight connection. Its been a decade, and now Sprint looks no closer to a solution despite all the on-again, off-again noise about its Xohm WiMAX dream.
As a former Sprint Broadband Direct customer, I was offered an EV-DO card for my laptop. Great. Now I get to pay more money to go online. And, of course, this service will be capped in some way or another. Watch one YouTube video and you are done for the month. Plus I dont even want to get into Zigbee, Bluetooth, and all the other wireless initiatives that are interesting but have limited usefulness.
At least Wi-Fi is still a good solution for connecting machines around the house, and the Wii in the family room seems to be happily connected to the Belkin Wi-Fi router upstairs. Still, a lot more than this one convenience should have happened by now. It didnt.
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