Coming soon: wireless technologies for the high bandwidth home

by Stuart Corner

Wednesday, 30 July 2008

Page 2 of 4 Belgacom has selected the MediaFlex 7000 for its Belgacom TV service, "one of the most successful IPTV services with over 390,000 subscribers throughout Belgium," according to Ruckus Wireless. Ruckus claims that "The 7000 beat out competitive 802.11n products in a series of stringent lab and home trials conducted by Belgacom, including a test to deliver 20 hours of non-stop HD IPTV streams at 20Mbps aggregate, to six different locations throughout a simulated home environment with injected interference, without dropping a single packet." Impressive. But according to WHDI developer Amimon, the 802.11n less than ideal for this purpose. "Traditional wireless video approaches have failed to provide an adequate solution to the problem of wireless HDTV connectivity because they treat the problem as a special case of data delivery. In a wireless data modem (e.g. 802.11n, MBOA-UWB) all bits are treated equally ― they all get the same level of protection from channel impairments. However, in video, different bits have different level of importance and the effect of an error greatly depends on which bit was corrupted." Then there is broadband over powerline. iTWire reported recently  the head of leading BPL chipset maker, DS2 complaining that broadband services into the home would have insufficient bandwidth to meet his technology's ability to distribute multiple high bandwidth data streams around the home at 400Mbps. However BPL's critics claim that, because it uses the same frequencies as ADSL, interference will be a problem for BPL. And there are yet more technologies in the pipeline. Commenting on the formation of the WHDI special interest group technology research firm, ABI Research noted that two of its members, Sony and Samsung are promoters of the other wireless video group called WirelessHD. "The WirelessHD consortium is based on SiBeam's 60GHz technology which is nearly ready for prime time, but hasn't quite made it to market yet," ABI said noting that Amimon is already shipping its 5GHz-based video modem technology to several customers. CONTINUED << First page <   1 2 3 4 Next page > Last page - Post your comment >>

 

< Next story in category		Previous story in the category >

Visitors last 30 days Suscribers

904,266 13,751