[opendtv] News: Bandwidth Advance Hints at Future Beyond Wi-Fi
- From: Craig Birkmaier <craig@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: OpenDTV Mail List <opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 4 May 2005 08:26:45 -0400
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/04/technology/techspecial/04markoff.html?th&emc=th
Bandwidth Advance Hints at Future Beyond Wi-Fi
By JOHN MARKOFF
Published: May 4, 2005
San Francisco
ONE barrier that has held back the much-hyped convergence of the
computer and consumer electronics industries has been the tangle of
wires that is needed to connect the cascade of home video, audio,
Internet and game gadgets.
Now the drive to unwire the living room is about to get a push.
In March, the Federal Communications Commission took a significant
step toward breaking an industry deadlock over setting a single
standard for a new wireless technology called ultrawideband, or UWB.
While traditional radio technologies have transmitted and received
analog signals only on specific frequencies, UWB uses inexpensive
computing power to send short radio pulses across much of the radio
spectrum. Because it does not use a single frequency, UWB offers
several advantages, including the capacity to send high volumes of
information quickly and the ability to share frequencies and resist
interference. It's like breaking a truck's cargo into loads small
enough to be carried on bicycles that can weave through a traffic jam.
The technology's potential, as yet unproven, is that it will be able
to increase the capacity of the radio spectrum drastically by
allowing users to share with existing licensed users.
Many computer and consumer electronics executives think that UWB will
become the next big thing in the second half of this decade, a
convenient alternative for all the cables that are now used to
connect everything from high-definition television monitors to stereo
speakers and anything in between. Moreover, some experts think that
UWB also has a future as a wireless networking technology that will
eventually replace the now ubiquitous Wi-Fi wireless standard.
"I look at UWB as the third wave of wireless at the edge," said Bill
Tai, a partner at the venture capital firm Charles River Ventures and
an investor in Staccato Communications in San Diego, one of many
start-up companies that are trying to capitalize on the potential
radio spectrum bonanza created by the F.C.C.'s approval of the new
technology.
"The potential is that there will be no cables hanging from your
shiny new flat-panel monitor that will be attached to the wall," Mr.
Tai said.
Staccato is one of more than 40 companies that have joined with the
WiMedia Alliance, an industry consortium led by Intel that is
pressing for a standard that will serve as a wireless alternative to
the popular USB cable standard.
Until recently, the WiMedia Alliance has been engaged in a standards
war with the UWB Forum, an opposing consortium of more than 100
companies, led by Motorola, that has been pushing for an alternative
technical approach to UWB.
With the F.C.C. approval, both sides have declared a temporary truce,
and it is now certain that the first products will begin to emerge
later this year or early next year.
That has led many in the industry, like Mr. Tai, to be increasingly
optimistic that UWB technologies will move into consumer applications
more rapidly than the two previous standards, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi.
"This should be a very freeing experience," Mr. Tai said. "This may
cross the chasm between consumer electronics and home PC."
And that is truly what the industry is dreaming of. With the
widespread availability of UWB, it would be possible to buy a new
high-definition television, plug it in and instantly receive a video
stream from a DVD playing in a personal computer that was set up in
the study, not the living room, without connecting any wires. In the
future, it may be possible to transmit wirelessly two multiple HDTV
signals simultaneously. A computer in the study, say, can send one
program to a television in the living room while receiving and
storing another program coming from a set-top box elsewhere in the
house.
Still, other technology designers have even broader ambitions for
UWB. Rajeev Krishnamoorthy, the founder and chief executive of TZero
Technologies, in Sunnyvale, Calif., helped lead the development of
the first Wi-Fi 802.11b chipsets at Agere Systems as an engineer in
the 1990's.
Mr. Krishnamoorthy said he had set out on that project when he saw
that the F.C.C. in 1996 had made available a band of unlicensed radio
spectrum to be used freely.
"I looked at their decision on UWB a couple of years ago and I
thought, 'déjà vu,' " he said.
While many of the UWB companies are aiming at the market for
replacing cables wirelessly, TZero wants to build a technology with
much higher speed and greater range. As a result, the company will
have to meet vexing technical challenges to make a system that is
more immune to interference, which could range from competing
transmitters to hair dryers.
Though the challenges are significant, so are the opportunities.
Today's Wi-Fi systems are limited to about 100 megabits of data a
second, a rate that will realistically support no more than a single
high-definition television video stream in the home, whereas UWB's
capacity is 500 megabits and faster.
The future, as Mr. Krishnamoorthy envisions it, will include wireless
home networks that will need to simultaneously interconnect multiple
screens, computers and audio and video streams.
"This is obvious, everyone can see the potential," he said.
What is yet to be proven by the nascent UWB industry, researchers
say, is whether the new technology will be able to share the radio
spectrum with existing users.
"My concern is still interference," said Laurence Milstein, a
professor of electrical and computer engineering at the Center for
Wireless Communications at the University of California, San Diego.
"The original logic of UWB is that you spread over wide frequency and
if you transmit at a low enough power then you won't interfere with
other users," Mr. Milstein said.
While it is possible that the industry will be able to reach that
goal, it has yet to prove that it can be done without creating the
radio equivalent of a traffic jam, he said.
The answer will begin to emerge in the next year as the first UWB
products reach the market. The future of the digital living room lies
in the balance.
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