Latest Technologies: Wi-Fi Technology

India Latest Technology - NANO

The much awaited Tata small car, which is giving sleepless nights to its rivals, was finally unveiled at the Auto Expo 2008. The small car, which is priced at Rs100, 000 (2,500 dollars), has been named Nano. According to the Tata Motors, the Nano will hit the Indian roads later this year. Ever since the Tatas announced their intention of developing the 1 lakh car (touted as people’s car), the auto industry experts have been raising doubts over the price, features, safety and specifications of Tata Nano. Have a look at specifications and other aspects of the Tata Nano, the four door mini-hatchback.

Looks & Dimensions of Nano: Keeping in mind the young age group, the Tata Motors has strived well to give the Nano a contemporary and stylish look. The snub-nosed small car derives inspiration from Fiat 500 and Nissan Micra. As far as dimensions of the car are concerned, Nano is 3.1 metres (10.23 feet) long, 1.5 metres wide and 1.6 metres high and can accommodate four to five people.

Engine: The small car sports a two cylinder 623 cc, 33 horsepower rear mounted multi-point fuel injection (MPFi) petrol engine. Tata claims that the car can touch the top speed of 105 kms.

Fuel Efficiency: Engineers at Tata Motors have designed an efficient engine that can run 20 Kms on every litre of petrol.

Pollution: Against the criticism and concerns of the environmentalists, Nano surpasses Indian regulatory requirements and Euro IV emission norms. In fact, Tata claims that the small car is less polluting than most of the bikes on Indian roads.

Safety: Tata says that they have tested the small car extensively for front, rear and side collisions and come out with a product that exceeds current regulatory requirements. The safety features of the Nano include a strong passenger compartment, intrusion resistant doors, seat belts, sturdy seats and anchorage.
Price: The base model of the car will sport a price tag of Rs 100,000 (2,500 dollars) which excludes taxes and transport costs. The high end/deluxe models will include air-conditioning and other features to be incorporated based on suggestions of the common people

Sunday, January 6, 2008

Wi-Fi Technology - II

WiFi Uses
So that's how so the next logical question is why and perhaps how to implement wireless networking?
In the Home
Home networking is not fun, that is reflected in the number of homes that have cabled CAT5 networks today, few homeowners want to run cabling under floors and have unsightly connection boxes in each room that you might use a device. So wireless is a real answer offering the ability for a broadband internet connection to be shared between users in the home, perhaps mum using the PC, dad on a laptop in the garden while the kids hook up their play station upstairs. Its only a small step from sharing your internet connection to a full network, sharing a printer and even a music server with all your collection stored as MP3's
This is the area that has seen the wifi explosion the home is leading the take up of wireless equipment and coupled with the rapid uptake of broadband wifi growth is assured for the next few years.
For home networking it is important to understand the components, each device will need a wireless card or dongle, they in turn connect to the hub which can be one of 3 devices.
The Wireless Access point is simply a translation device that sits connected to your main PC and allows any wireless device to talk to it, this means that if that PC is off then so is everyone's internet connection. Next a Wireless router, this is similar to the access point but allows routing around the home network so 2 laptops can network even if the main PC is off, but again if the internet connection is through the main PC if its off then so is you web connection.
By far the most popular choice is a wireless router / modem, be careful to get the right modem either dial up, DSL or ADSL these allow you to network all of your devices and as long as the wireless hub is on any device can access the internet, commonly these will have an inbuilt firewall and some cabled connections.
In the Workplace
The workplace on the other hand is far more cautious, most offices already have a perfectly good and fast (at least 100mbits) network in place, so what benefits are there for wireless? In strict terms for desktop PC's there are few, but more and more workers are issued with laptops as standard. Those laptops will almost certainly have a wireless access card as standard and the new centrino technology for Intel means every laptop shipped has embedded wifi.
So of course it makes sense to use wifi, but security conscious businesses are not happy with the level of encryption offered by WEP alone and are layering extra security on top far beyond rolling updates of keys, this makes networks a nightmare to manage and thus restricts growth in this area.
We must also consider the number of devices in an office network there could be hundreds of devices trying to share the limited number of channels, then there are issues of where to site access points to work most efficiently. Its not all doom and gloom with good planning these can be overcome to fully extract the business benefits of wireless networks but it takes some guts to get started.
Next Steps for Wifi
While many industry pundits (of whom we do not claim to be one) talk of hot spots and longer ranges it seems likely that the next 12 months will bring wifi into new devices, first mobile phones will have wifi alongside Bluetooth then add wifi to MP3 players allowing them to stream. Longer term Wifi may become the defacto standard for connecting household electronics and automating your home, heard this before? well yes that was Bluetooth.
What's different about wifi, well its cheap, commonly available and understood and if you don't have it in your home maybe you should, this is a consumer led growth you should be part of it.