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April 25, 2007
Wild Wild World of Wireless
If you want a headache, think about all the new flavors of wireless technologies in the pipeline and coming to a neighborhood near you.
Wireless USB - Available, well, now, almost. Vendors are shipping devices in small quantities, but you should see a real pickup in the technology by the fall. Right now, it's a wire-replacement, but people are trying to figure out ways to graft mesh networking on top of it so you can have your HDVideo and view it (in the next room, next floor) too. Yes, 480 Mbps up to 10 meters, 110 Mbps for longer distances that I can't remember....
802.11n - Not to be officially finalized until March 2009, according to the latest timeline over at the IEEE, but vendors are determined to put out pre-N, draft-N, and N devices without it. Good news is, when it finally does arrive, it will have better security and speed. Bad news is everyone will have to upgrade to "True N" to take advantage of all the whistles. Will likely be used for both in-home and last mile access.
WiMAX - Clearwire and Sprint are deploying networks across North America and it should be interesting to see what Sprint does in coupling WiMAX with its cellular network. I suspect the biggest use of this tech might be in automobiles to download video for cross country road trips.
LTE - Long Term Evolution. There's talk about doing up to 120 Mbps (or faster) over cellular frequencies and technologies. Are you drooling yet? We're talking some serious bandwidth in the palm of your hand - speeds that are faster than most cable and DSL providers deliver today by a factor of 10x. (Comparison: Verizon FIOS 35 Mbps, some rare cable companies 50 Mbps).
700 MHz (Licensed) - This spectrum translates to freed-up TV channels between 52-69. QUALCOMM has tapped into one "channel" to implement MediaFLO aka Verizon Wireless's TV capability on a nationwide basis. Speculators sitting on a good chunk of it waiting for the spectrum to "clear" after the U.S. transitions to DTV in 2009. Another good chunk is scheduled to go up for auction in the next few months and they'll be a battle royale over the licenses.
TV Whitespaces - Anyone familiar with TV before cable knows that a (NTSC) TV only pulls in about a dozen or so channels between channels 2-69. As noted above, channels 52-69 are going away (being sold).
This leaves 2-51. And you can still only pull in a dozen channels. The rest of the channels, for various RF engineering reasons are not used or "whitespaces."
The FCC is working on a final ruling this fall to allow the UNLICENSED use of TV Whitespaces for broadband and there's a coalition of tech companies pushing hard for it to take place soon. Usage will likely be Wi-Fi-esque, except with better range and datarates... so both in-house and last-mile are possible/potential.
Posted by dmohney at April 25, 2007 11:08 PM