TVs, Ultrabooks and smartphones may have grabbed the headlines at the Consumer Electronics Show this past week, but there was a quieter wireless revolution also taking place that is set to provide important connectivity benefits for all our devices this year.
2012 could be the year of 5G – the 5th-generation of Wi-Fi - along with the maturity of a number of other wireless and wired technologies that will provide a major leap in speeds and easier ways to transfer video and other content from device to device.
Looking at Broadcom’s booth with its panoply of wireless technologies and talking to chief technology officer and co-founder Henry Samueli, it was hard not to come away with the impression that we are on the verge of having many of our wireless frustrations – dead spots, slow speeds, limited range and connectivity – blown away.
Broadcom sees itself as the leader in 5G and introduced at CES its first family of IEEE 802.11ac chips – the 5th generation successor to the current 802.11n standard.
5G Wi-Fi routers expected in the second half of the year will break through the gigabit data rate barrier (802.11n maxes out at around 600 megabits per second), giving the same kind of speeds currently enjoyed by standard Gigabit Ethernet wired connections.
That’s in theory, of course. The vagaries of Wi-Fi’s penetration through obstacles can decrease speeds dramatically, but Mr Samueli pointed out that, compared to 802.11n, 5G would still only drop down to perhaps 10Mb/s at its outer limits – good enough bandwidth for most applications.
5G uses the 5GHz band, where there is more room than the crowded 2.4GHz area of the spectrum, but we could also see certification from the Wi-Fi Alliance industry body late this year for devices using 60GHz and capable of multi-gigabit data rates.
This 802.11ad standard will allow uncompressed high-definition video to be moved around and enable wireless video gaming with no lag in performance. But the limited range of 60GHz means this is an in-room rather than a multi-room technology.
The 5GHz and 60GHz advances represent a more standards-based approach and perhaps an eventual end to a wireless tangle of competing technologies.
“You can imagine 60GHZ giving you these islands of multi-gigabit connectivity around your TV and a Blu-ray player perhaps in your home, but then around that is this sea of 5GHz Wi-Fi covering your entire house,” explained Kevin Robinson, marketing manager of the Wi-Fi Alliance industry body.
“If you were streaming from a Blu-ray player to a tablet in your living room and you walked to the other side of the house, you would be able to transition that stream over to 5GHz and continue watching it.”
This seamless, automatic hand-off could give the standards an advantage over the likes of Amimon and SiBeam’s pioneering high-data-rate usage of 5GHz and 60GHz respectively. SiBeam was acquired by Silicon Image last May and the technology is now being aimed at mobile uses. Amimon continues to work with the Wireless Home Digital Interface consortium that supports its technology and showed a Lenovo concept tablet using a WHDI chip to transfer video to a TV with an appropriate WHDI dongle attached.
Similarly, Intel has popularised its WiDi technology for beaming a laptop’s screen to a TV and LG has announced it will integrate WiDi into its 2012 Cinema 3D smart TVs , making a dongle or other adapter unnecessary.
However, Wi-Fi Display, designed for the same purpose, is expected to attract wider support. The Wi-Fi Alliance says it expects to certify products using this technology for beaming audio and video to displays and home theatre units around the middle of this year.
This builds on Wi-Fi Direct technology, where the alliance has already certifed 440 products for wireless exchanges of data between devices. Look for smartphones, tablets and projectors, as well as laptops, to be equipped with Wi-Fi Display.
Among other connectivity standards being pushed at CES:
MHL, standing for Mobile High-Definition Link, is a cable that plugs into TVs with MHL-enabled HDMI sockets to charge a smartphone and play its video and audio on the bigger screen. There are other applications – Roku showed how its web-streaming box could be reduced to an MHL stick.
HomePlug AV2 - This new version of the standard for turning electrical circuits in the home into broadband networks will raise speeds to the gigabit level.
The MoCA 2.0 standard from the Multimedia over Coax Alliance will appear in products this year. This offers speeds of 400Mb/s, double that of the first version. MoCA uses the regular co-axial wires from cable TV to route broadband internet over the home’s network.
IEEE 1905.1 – Qualcomm’s Atheros division announced its Hy-Fi chip portfolio would comply with this recently approved draft standard for hybrid home networking. This is the kind of standard needed to draw together wired and wireless technologies and dissipate consumer confusion – there will be interoperability between Wi-Fi, HomePlug powerline, Ethernet and Multimedia over Coax using this software solution that allows the creation of hybrid networks in the home.
