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Roads Diverge to Wireless Net Service Quality
Engineers hammering out a quality-of-service (QoS) standard for 802.11 networks have agreed to disagree by writing two distinctly different mechanisms into a draft standard that could be ratified early next year. Computer industry companies such as Intel and Microsoft have rallied support for Enhanced Distributed Channel Access (EDCA), a best-efforts mechanism in which devices negotiate for bandwidth based on up to eight levels of priority using traditional 802.11 probabilistic methods. A group consisting of Atheros Communications, Cisco Systems, Intersil and others has already defined a subset of the pre-standard EDCA features, called Wireless Multimedia Enhancements, and implemented it in products. Consumer OEMs and some carriers argue that the scheme does not provide the bandwidth and latency guarantees they need for glitch-free voice, music and video. They are lobbying for a polled-access scheme, broadly known as the Hybrid Coordination Function, in which access points regularly poll and grant devices exclusive access to an 802.11 channel in a more deterministic fashion.
Read the full story on: CommsDesign
Atheros Ships First Final-Spec 802.11g Chip
WLAN chip maker Atheros on Tuesday became the first to market with 802.11g product based on the final draft — version 8.2 — of the standard when it announced it has begun shipping its third-generation, AR5002 family of client and base-station Wi-Fi silicon. The AR5002 line provides 802.11b, g and a through two-chip solutions (a MAC/baseband part plus a radio chip). The AR500X provides full-range dual-band networking, while the AR5002G supports the 2.4GHz band standards and the AR5002A targets the corporate 5GHz market with Wireless Multimedia Enhancements quality-of-service provision.
Read the full story on: The Register
Qualcomm Bolsters Lead with New Chips
Qualcomm unveiled a new batch of top-of-the-line mobile chipsets, bolstering its leadership in the market for processors that power mobile phones. The new chipset, the 7000 series, was designed to address the need for handset devices that support 3G multimedia and high data rates for wireless data applications. Qualcomm is integrating 802.11 and Bluetooth support into the phone so that handsets can talk to PCs and other wireless devices.
Read the full story on: NewsFactor
AT&T Wireless Sets Messaging Records
AT&T Wireless said TV show American Idol created what it calls the “largest text-messaging event by a single carrier worldwide.” More than 7.5 million American Idol-related messages were sent by the carriers subscribers during the shows season, the carrier said. The carrier also said one-third of the participants had never sent a text message before over its network, that the number of text votes increased by nearly 5,000 percent from the first episode to the last, that 70 percent of the text voters voted more than once, and that 2,300 text messages per second were sent at one point.
Read the full story on: WirelessWeek.com
Sybase Invests $25 Million in Wi-Fi Application Development
Sybase plans to invest $25 million over the next year to make using public wireless LAN networks more cost-effective and reliable for accessing enterprise applications, the company announced Tuesday. Sybase will invest some of that $25 million in building a network of competency centers for Wi-Fi research, the first of which will be hosted at the University of Waterloo, in Waterloo, Ontario. The company also intends to collaborate with its software development partners to embed Sybase technology in their applications for mobile devices.
Read the full story on: InfoWorld