Linksys Rolls Out Faster Wi-Fi Products

The biggest seller of home wireless LAN equipment is set to launch its gear for the next technology generation on Monday, introducing three products based on a draft of the IEEE 802.11n standard.

The still-emerging standard is designed to deliver at least 100 megabits per second of real throughput. That’s more than most wired Ethernet connections and with its improved range is enough to send multiple high-definition video streams throughout a typical home, according to Cisco Systems’ Linksys division. The Irvine, California, company is set to launch a wireless router, notebook card, and gateway on Monday.

Vendors are lining up to offer consumers equipment based on a preliminary version of the standard even though they can’t guarantee it will work with other early products. But unless a consumer is already doing huge downloads or trying to send video over a wireless LAN, it makes more sense to wait until next year for lower prices anyway, according to ABI Research analyst Mike Wolf.

The WRT300N Wireless-N Broadband Router and WPC300N Wireless-N Notebook Adapter are available online immediately from BestBuy.com and coming to other retailers soon. The router has an estimated street price of $150 and the PC Card is expected to sell for $120, double or more the prices of standard consumer 802.11g gear, which has a theoretical top speed of 54 mbps.

More to Come

The products are just the first of a series of offerings to be based on the draft 802.11n standard, according to Cisco. Also Monday, the company is announcing a DSL gateway with the new technology, shipping in Europe starting May 15, Cisco said. Other products in the Wireless-N family, for both homes and small businesses, will come in the second half of this year.

All the draft 11n products are backward compatible with the current 802.11b and 802.11g specifications and certified by the Wi-Fi Alliance industry group for that capability, said Malachy Moynihan, vice president and general manager of Linksys’ home networking unit. The products also include WPA (Wi-Fi Protected Access) encryption for security.

Support for home wireless video, which is not widely used with current wireless LANs, will be the major benefit of 802.11n, ABI’s Wolf said. Developments such as AT&T’s April 18 deal to send Akimbo Systems video-on-demand content over DSL indicate that the vision of converged computing and entertainment is moving forward, he said. In addition to streaming content between a PC and a wireless LAN-equipped TV or set-top box, consumers with high-speed wireless will find it easier to take matters into their own hands, he said.

“People are just going to send their own recorded shows onto their portable devices,” such as mobile phones and game players, he predicted.

Linksys hopes buyers will be able to upgrade to the final standard with software, but can’t guarantee it, Moynihan said. Interoperability among products will be a more complicated question under 802.11n than with earlier standards, he said. The standard lets vendors use different numbers of radios and antennas, so various combinations of products will be capable of different speeds. There may also be optional elements added to the standard to handle mobile-device issues such as roaming and power management, he added.

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How Common Is Identity Theft?

Wondering how likely you are to have your credit card number stolen? Well, according to a comprehensive survey conducted by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), identity theft is affecting millions of households in the U.S each year and costing an estimated $6.4 billion per year.

About 3 percent of all households in the U.S., totaling an estimated 3.6 million families, were hit by some sort of ID theft during the first six months of 2004, according to DOJ data released this week.

The data comes from the Justice Department’s National Crime Victimization Survey, which interviews members of 42,000 households across the country every six months to better understand the nature, frequency, and consequences of crime. Households that participate in the survey are selected at random and then interviewed by DOJ statisticians twice a year for three years.

The DOJ has been compiling this information for more than 30 years, but this marks the first time it has asked households about identity theft, said survey author Katrina Baum, a statistician with the Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics.

Common Consequences

According to the DOJ’s numbers, credit card misuse is the most common consequence of identity theft. It accounted for about half of the cases of identity theft that the survey tracked, Baum said.

Of the other identity theft victims, about 25 percent had banking and other types of accounts used without permission, 15 percent had their personal information misused, and about 12 percent faced a combination of several types of ID theft.

The average loss from these crimes amounted to $1290, with two-thirds of respondents saying that the theft cost them money. Based on these numbers, the nationwide estimated loss during the six months of the study amounted to $3.2 billion, for an annualized total of $6.4 billion.

The young and the well-to-do appear to be more at risk for identity theft, according to the DOJ numbers. Households headed by people between 18 and 24 years of age and those with incomes of $75,000 or more were the most likely to experience identity theft. Households in urban and suburban areas were also more likely to be affected.

According to Baum, 5 percent of households earning more than $75,000 per year experienced this kind of crime. “It’s usually a phenomenon that’s experienced by the young and those in urban households,” she said. The survey did not explore why this is the case.

The “Identity Theft 2004” report is available online.

More information on the National Crime Victimization Survey can be found online.

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Interesting Fact: Bogon IP Addresses

Steve Gibson from GRC was talking about these “bogon” ip addresses that are still unused on the Internet. He estimates that approximately 40% of our current IP address space is bogon, or simply reserved and unallocated.

If you just look at the first byte or octet of the IP Address, ie n.*.*.* , anything that starts with the below numbers are bogon:

0
1
2
5
7
23
27
31
36
37
39
42
48
50
77
78
79
89 through 123
127 – (local host range)
173 through 187
197

As Steve said, we are not running out of IP Addresses. I guess we just need to start utilizing all the ones we have available to us.

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A Faster, Denser Hard Drive Debuts

The reorientation of hard drives has begun: The first drives to use perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) technology to pack more data into less space are out. And our tests reveal that they not only boost storage capacity but perform faster as well.

In our tests of the Seagate Momentus 5400.3 and its non-PMR 5400.2 predecessor, the PMR unit showed a modest boost overall, completing its runs in about 7 percent less time; results just for sustained throughput were even more impressive with a 15 to 17 percent gain. The PMR drive’s greater areal density has little effect on seek speed, a component of many of our tests, but helped when our tasks focused on sustained throughput with sizable files.

PMR aligns the magnetic markers on a hard-disk surface in a different way to increase areal density so you can store more data on every platter. Existing technology was approaching its areal density limits, and drive manufacturers spent several years working to overcome the problem. The result for you is more and cheaper room for your data–which is no small concern in a world moving to high-definition media.

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Dell Snaps Up Alienware

Dell has agreed to purchase high-performance PC vendor Alienware, the two companies announced Wednesday.

The acquisition will “complement Dell’s own line of high-performance computers,” while giving the Alienware products the benefits of Dell’s “supply chain and operational efficiencies,” the companies said in a statement.

Details

The purchase, which was rumored for weeks, is expected to clear regulatory requirements in 30 to 60 days. Ultimately, the acquisition will shorten the time it takes for customers to get their hands on Alienware’s sleek gaming workstations and laptops.

It can take from four to six weeks for customers to take possession of some of Alienware’s products, said Mark Vena, an Alienware spokesman. For Dell that lead time is generally less than 10 days, he said. “They’re absolutely world-class in that area.”

Dell already sells high-end workstations under its XPS brand, but with the Alienware acquisition it gets something that the Round Rock, Texas-based company would have had a hard time creating on its own: gamer cachet.

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