“On Oct. 14, the Wi-Fi Alliance, a tech industry consortium, said its members will release technology that effectively turns gadgets into mini access points, able to create wireless connections with other Wi-Fi-enabled gadgets or broadband modems within a radius of about 300 feet. The alliance includes Intel, Cisco Systems, Apple, and more than 300 other makers of the equipment that runs Wi-Fi networks, often used to provide wireless Web connections in homes, cafés, hotels, and airports,” Olga Kharif reports for BusinessWeek.
“The new technology, called Wi-Fi Direct, will be built directly into consumer electronics and automatically scan the vicinity for existing hotspots and the gamut of Wi-Fi equipped devices, including phones, computers, TVs, and gaming consoles. Owners of most existing Wi-Fi-enabled devices will be able to upgrade to Wi-Fi Direct with a simple software download,” Kharif reports for BusinessWeek.
Full article here.
I’m ready for wi-max
Install this widgets in cars and we have automatic city wide Wi-Fi.
Sounds cool.
Pity they don’t explain WTF this might be useful for. Good luck with that mass marketing blitz if nerds can’t even glean the benefit from a full-page write up.
Yeah, I don’t get it. How will this help anybody?
This is supposed to kill Blue-Tooth. Why have two separate battery-sucking radios if just a minor tweak of an existing protocol can provide same functionality with significantly greater speeds (and range)?
@DX and Original Jake
Use your brains and do a little research –Business Week has no incentive to pay for extra writing to advertise something that hasn’t even been released yet. They expect that their readers are mostly business people who might make an investment decision based on what they do, not consumers who need to persuaded to buy some gadget.
The answer–you don’t need to buy a Linksys or mobile cellphone company route to spread point-source broadband access to a wide variety of devices, in places like cars, airports, private studies, etc. Wi-Fi Direct will solve the security and compatibility problems that Cisco and the cellphone companies have done in a clumsy fashion.
So tired of whiners. . .
This is a peer-to-peer specification, allowing WiFi devices to connect directly with each other rather than needing a wireless router. This is extremely beneficial to everyone. It basically mimics the ability of Bluetooth allowing two devices to communicate between each other.
Currently WiFi devices have to go through an intermediary device (wireless router) that sets up a local WiFi network in order to communicate with each other… For example you’re always asked to “choose a wireless network”. Instead of needing to connect to an entire network, this new spec will allow you to “choose a wireless device” to connect to.
This is analogous to a null modem cable or ethernet “patch” cable when you need to connect directly to only one device.
WiFi mesh network creating a growing relay of shared access points. Think of it as P2P WiFi.
You’re in the parking of a gas station filling up and need to check your email there is a Starbucks 3 blocks from you with a open WiFi Hotspot running WiFi Direct and 13 HD TVs with WiFi Direct enabled WiFi in them. You pull out your iPod touch and connect to the internet and get your email using the open Starbucks WiFi Hotspot. The WiFi Direct devices between you and Starbucks made that connect possible as they extended the signal and relayed the traffic from one device to the next. All without you needing to know were and to what hotspot you were routed to.
In denser areas like say a crowded city street or Apartment building you might have many open WiFi connects with WiFi Direct and many hundred or even thousands of devices to peer together for better then cell phone coverage. A moving network mesh of WiFi Direct enabled devices all sharing a common channel and all without conflicting and walking all over each other peered together into one massive networking sharing multiply internet connections.
I believe this will allow wifi gizmos to easily talk to each other directly. For example, it wasn’t until the OS 3.0 that iPhones could talk to each other over wifi.
“Business Week has no incentive to pay for extra writing to advertise something that hasn’t even been released yet.”
You mean for a non-Microsoft product. Because we’ve seen that MS is pretty free with the loot when trying to advertise vaporware.
@@Paul Johnson
Good point by you!
But if every device is a potential relay point then what keeps your device from bogging down as it handles requests?
Will this help my kids to communicate with me?? It will help to translate teen-speak?
I want my refrigerator to stop sending me signals.
Better still, Buster, w/ it help my kids HEAR me better?
Right now, when I speak, my teens hear “wha wha wha” (ala muted trumpet – Charlie Brown style)
I’m just worried that if we adopt this system and come to rely on it too much, then it’ll be easier for the aliens to take out our whole communications structure in one go. And then where would we be?
Sounds like Wi-Min.
Sounds like Zune-squirting to me.
I haven’t taken the time to read all the documentation, but security is my main concern. It could be like Bluetooth-hacking with much greater range.
I am sure it would have good uses, but in an environment where we wish to retain some control over the networking of devices, I don’t see the benefit, just more worries. It’s good thing that the 400 computers in this school have to go through my network.
Know what I mean?
Yippeeeee! With this WiFi will be FREE to most users!
Will I be able to squirt?
@ Paul Johnson
Your post is obnoxious and doesn’t make sense.
This is peer-to-peer, and it sounds like it will rock for adhoc networking. As someone mentioned above, it’s a replacement for bluetooth.
@Dirty Pierre le Punk
Just press the Big Red Button. That’s what Dr. Who would do.
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Sort of an omni-directional daisy-chain?
@Randolph Kirkpatrick
My post is obnoxious, but well deserved.
What do you think a wireless router does now, absent Wi-Fi Direct?
@Paul Johnson
Here’s is how I’m understanding this, which my not be correct, but then again I didn’t suggest anyone had a deficit of brains nor that they were whiners.
For most purposes I think to network 2 devices using WiFi, then both devices need to be on the same network, usually one created by a local router.
If there’s no local router, then it’s not so simple to send data from one device to the other.
Now you can set up one device, such as your MacBook, to create an adhoc network, then have another join it. But this seems to be about simplifying that process, making devices discoverable, so you can just easily, say, connect up to your friends phone using WiFi, instead of BT, to send over an email or photo or contact info. Without one device needing to be the central network point.
I don’t think it particularly has much to do with spreading broadband. It’s not like the phone in my pocket is going to drain its battery being a repeater any time I’m in a network.
But I gotta admit, I don’t really understand your point or what the hell BusinessWeek has to do with it.
MW: respect