Coming soon: wireless technologies for the high bandwidth home

by Stuart Corner

Wednesday, 30 July 2008

Page 3 of 4 The WirelessHD group was formed in October 2006 by Intel G, Matsushita (Panasonic), NEC, Samsung, SiBeam, Sony and Toshiba. It released its first specification in January 2008 by which time membership had grown to include 40 early adopter and promoter companies. The group claimed that the technology would enable throughput at up to 4Gbps and said it represented "the first consumer application of 60GHz technology" and would be "suitable for a wide range of devices including televisions, HD disc players, set-top boxes, camcorders, gaming consoles, adapter products, as well as other source devices." ABI Research thinks that all these technologies, and others "are settling into more or less clearly defined roles, and will by and large coexist and complement each other rather than competing." According to senior analyst Douglas McEuen, "Each of these technologies has a sweet spot or specialty." He continues: "Bluetooth will be the driving technology in the PAN (personal area network) and may see some success in remote controls, especially for gaming. Wi-Fi will be the key technology for wireless LAN (local area network). UWB and 60GHz respectively will be specialised for home office peripherals, and for wireless HDMI (uncompressed video sent from a set-top box to a high-definition TV)." And hoping for a significant slice of this nascent market is an Australian technology: the 60GHz short range wireless technology developed by NICTA . Project leader Stan Skafidas admits that competition with the 5GHz technology and between different 60GHz technologies will be tough, but says NICTA's technology has an edge, particularly over the 5GHz technology which he claims will not easily scale to higher bandwidths. "The way they are doing that is by encoding the data they are transmitting and you want to increase that data rate it is a non trivial exercise It will be very difficult for that 5gig standard to grow with growing capabilities of other technologies in the multimedia space...People are already talking about HDTV at 2048 x 2048 pixels. CONTINUED << First page <   1 2 3 4 Next page > Last page - Post your comment >>

 

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