Ad-croc (errr, I mean Ad-hoc) [Wi-Fi Direct] is coming, Oh Great (rolls eyes upward…)

What a croc of … Sorry if I seem (quite a bit) less than overwhelmed about the announcement of Wi-Fi Direct coming. Most of the rags on the Internet just automatically buy into it. They just re-blog (like re-tweet?) what the Press Release says.

http://www.wi-fi.org/news_articles.php?f=media_news&news_id=909

This isn’t a press release, but the Wikipedia page on Wi-Fi Direct:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wi-Fi_Direct

Yah it’ll be supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. But what if…

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious

just like supercalifragilistic is “a nonsense word meaning fantastic”, what if Wi-Fi Direct is a nonsense thing seeking similar attention? (If it aint broke, don’t fix it.)

Now bear with me for a minute. I’m all for making devices easier to connect. Just not on an already over-crowded WiFi band. Let’s look back at the problem of overlapping channels. Don’t we say you can only use channels 1, 6, and 11 when access points are going to be in each others signal area? Now add 10 or 15 more “ad hoc” access points in the same signal area. Now how many overlaps do you have? Yah I know this will work on 5 Ghz as well. How soon before that has overlapping channel problems with this?

Yep, Throw in just everybody doing their own “ad hoc” networks in a possibly already problem area, such as a business (enterprise.), or your home, or your boat.

I just worked on a marine vessel the other day, where they used 2 Wireless Access Points in the same area. One for a WiFi super universal remote control (called Crestron) and one for regular wireless users. They were in close proximity to each other. There were also multiple deck levels (stories or floors for you home or office users). So not only did I have to “1 - 6 and 11″ the regular zones, but also the doubled up (2) access points in some areas.

So now imagine that everyone and every device gets to be a network. Demanding a channel within the wifi frequency space “somewhere”. When you get to 4 devices vying for a channel (1, 6 & 11) - then what’s going to happen? Or are we all (devices, computers) just going to join the local ad-hoc network wether we want to or not? Windows Vista will go nuts incrementing the network number that it’s connecting to. I was working on some Wi-Fi sharing devices the other day using Vista and I was up to connection #16 I think.

Then there’s the issue of security. An enterprise or business is not going to like lots of wireless networks popping up all of a sudden, that they don’t manage. Yes, these things are supposedly going to have automatic WPA2 encryption … but it doesn’t do anything for the firewalling between computers and devices. Users will have file sharing on, but maybe they didn’t want to share their files with EVERYBODY all of a sudden. They may have file “write” enabled allowing just anybody that ad-hocs in to edit or erase their files.

Hopefully there will be an “Wi-Fi Direct” OFF button for every computer and device. That way you can make users shut it off and kill any interference that it causes.

And perhaps there will be “YES”, “NO”, and “MAYBE” buttons for the users to choose from to decide wether or not to connect to some ad-hoc network?

—

Alan Spicer Telecom / Alan Spicer Marine Telecom

http://www.marinetelecom.net and http://www.wifiyacht.net

+1 954-683-3426

This entry was posted on 19. October 2009 at 22:46 and is filed under Main. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.