• mlg@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    The sheer amount of engineering, FCC regulations, and wizardry that goes into making 802.11 fast is insane. It feels weird seeing so much data get shoved through radio waves which are still subject to only one transmission at a time which is why we have stuff like CSMA/CA and MIMO

    Still no match for good ol ethernet though lol

    • Prophet Zarquon@startrek.website
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      9 months ago

      802.15.4a/ab/ac, seems even weirder, given what we’ve become used to with AM/FM signaling modes.

      After the usual “Huh, that seems like a clever way to send signals” reaction, a closer perusal of the tech & its established industrial capabilities, reveals Surface penetrating radar for machine vision & medical imaging, P2P, P2MP, local file-exchange, low-power low-latency streaming, greater range than bluetooth, greater interference resistance than WiFi, & reduced airtime per Mb, at lower emission power than a hair dryer or cellphone.

      Gee, I wonder why it got forcibly channeled into exclusively device-to-device location pings, with no direct radio access or firmware, available to devs?

      Seriously, go look at what the military, industrial, security, & medical sectors have already been doing with UWB, then look at the specs for the compact chipsets & SOCs released since 2017, & then look at what BMW, Apple, Google, & Samsung are doing with it. Oh yay, Airtags. I mean, they do work, but they’re about 1/1000th of what the U1 could do, if app devs had access to the radio instead of being gatekept behind the FindMy device-to-device services.