Coming soon: wireless technologies for the high bandwidth home

Stuart Corner
Wednesday, 30 July 2008 14:42

Business IT - Technology

5GHz has much better penetration through walls than 60GHz which he says will be more of an in-room technology. "One of the major applications [of 60GHz] will be to provide wireless HDMI to get rid of that rats nest of cables behind your plasma TV screen, Blu-ray player etc," Also, he added: "Whenever you connect a lot of systems today because of the multiplicity of standards and connections under some circumstance you can get a loss of sync between picture and sound and other bits of information.

"It will provide the end user with a much better multimedia experience. Everything will work together. It is essentially about making it easier to connect all your consumer electronics together." However, he suggested that the 60GHz technology could be deployed to provide coverage throughout a home using multiple units in a mesh network.

Skafidas described the whole market as being "a very competitive space and a very tough space, and Sibeam the company behind the WirelessHD 60GHz technology as "a good company with a really good solution, but saying that the NICTA technology which is implemented in CMOS on a single chip "will be easier to integrate, to build a product and to deploy." He added that developing the technology had been "the easy part," said the major challenge would be "to commercialise this technology and to make a business out of it."

Despite all this activity, Ericsson Leins for one does not expect rapid uptake. "Given that TVs are not replaced every 12 months (unlike a mobile phone), the integration of these features and functionality into mainstream consumer electronics will take years. DLNA (www.dlna.org) is another such initiative that will allow digital content sharing within the home, but again it will be years before products are on the market, let alone commonly adopted by the majority of households."