[AG-TECH] AG on wireless

[Markus Buchhorn]

At 05:12 PM 21/03/2002 -0600, Allison Clark wrote:
>Actually replacing the LAN cabling to fixed boxes - but the former interests me as well. 

Ok. I haven't tested AGs with them yet, but I've played with them for other purposes. How are you thinking of using wireless links? or perhaps a better question is why can't you use wired network links? Given all the other cables for audio, video, power, etc. Or is this some ultra-portable AG node?

For local LAN stuff you can use one of the various 802.11 variants. 11b is everywhere now, and with a theoretical peak of 11Mb/s, and actual throughput of around 6.5Mb/s. 11a runs in the 5GHz space at peak 54Mb/s, actual around 32Mb/s? but shorter range. There's also 11g which gives you around 22Mb/s peak, but there's not much hardware I have heard of yet. 

One feature to watch for is 802.11e for things like QoS support - there's one or two vendors starting to appear there. 

So pick your bandwidth. Given multiple video streams at 300k-1Mb/s, and multiple audio streams around 30-100k, the 802.11b (11Mb) starts to look a bit thin.

One hassle with 802.11b being everywhere is that presenter's laptops are starting to come with them. How you segregate the bandwidth in a room becomes an issue (channel allocations).

If you want longer distances there are other options, with other constraints. IR lasers, microwave up to 66GHz, UWB, ....

Then there's alternatives such as using wired links for network/data, but wireless for transmitting audio/video to the codecs.

Cheers,
        Markus


Markus Buchhorn, Information Infrastructure Services,   | Ph: +61 2 61258810
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