Intel researchers put WiFi inside—the processor, that is
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
I think maybe some of you missed the part where they say:
While the back-end elements of wireless have been digitized long ago, the front end—phase modulation, frequency synthesis, and RF power amplification, for example—have largely been dependent on analog components.
The problem posed by those analog components is that while digital components can be scaled down with improvements in silicon die manufacturing, the analog parts can't—as they get smaller, they get worse, Ratter said. Yorgos Palaskas, the research leader in Intel's radio integration lab, said that because analog components generally performed much better when manufactured on a larger scale, the analog components for WiFi transceivers and cell phones "are typically made on a separate fab."
...
Some of the components already existed in a digital form, but needed to be significantly improved. Intel had digital phase modulators already that were developed for satellite and mobile communications, but they only handled enough frequency channels for 3G communications. "We needed much wider channels for WiFi, up to 40 MHz of bandwidth," Palaskas said. "It required some very creative mathematical manipulation."
For example, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11ad aims at 7Gb/s. http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/2012-mobile-hdd-charts/-0... gives max read speed for mobile disks at less than 1.5Gb/s.
Form that viewpoint, I can see a laptop disk drive that only needs a power connection. Battery-operated, you could even keep it in your bag while using it,
Big questions, however, are a) whether people will still want external drives for thei laptops. SSDs and the cloud may supplant them, b) whether the bandwidth is reliable enough (what if I sit next to someone who also has a Wi-Fi external drive?) and c) whether it is a wise idea to make it so easy to detach your disk. Software will have to be prepared to handle the case "user picks up laptop and walks out of range of external disk"
Especially for reasons a and b, I do not see this happen.
Personally though, I don't mind having an internal SSD in my laptop (although it is a bit small, really should get a bigger one). I also don't mind cables for external storage drives. As for Wi-Fi, I usually have a hard time hitting the maximum bandwidth of my AP (where maximum bandwidth is slightly less then half the connection speed). Wi-Fi is also prone to interference. One interesting thing about the 802.11 ac spec is that it now supports channel bonding on upto eight channels, which severely limits the 5GHz band, which was supposed to take away all the congestion we have on 2.4GHz.
http://techreport.com/news/23303/marvell-wilocity-partner-up... writes about it:
"We're told latency will be in the order of "microseconds, not milliseconds"
So, latency will not be much of a problem with this solution.
I do have the impression that this is called Wi-Fi only on commercial grounds, not on technical ones.
Although if you had a stupidly fast internet connection it would be possible to hold devices images in RAM centrally and may turn out to be quicker than booting from local storage.