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WirelessHD means widespread boxes

October 2, 2008 12:33am
by Chris Nuttall

SiBeam WirelessHD demoWirelessHD can not only eliminate much of the spaghetti of wires behind your TV set, it can also take away the boxes sitting under it.

I came rather late to this realisation during a demonstration by John LeMoncheck, chief executive of SiBeam, the Silicon Valley company behind the technology.

He showed me a Blu-ray player spaced well away from a TV monitor beaming high-definition pictures onto it using WirelessHD transceivers.

These components will be integrated into TVs and other consumer electronics devices such as camcorders from next year or made available as plug-in “dongles”.

It means you can hang the TV on a wall, put the DVD player under the coffee table, hide the games console in the aspidistra and put the home theatre receiver under the cat.

As Mr LeMoncheck showed, by covering up the transmitter, WirelessHD does not need a clear line of sight to work, radio waves in the high 60-gigahertz band find ways to bounce around a room in milliseconds to reroute the path to the receiver.

“We’ve more bandwidth than ultra-wide band (UWB), I like to tell people we’re more ultra than ultra wideband,” says the chief executive, referring to a rival technology.

WirelessHD can serve high-definition 1080p pictures at 3.5 gigabits a second and can scale to 25 gigabits, future-proofing it for developments such as 3D TV.

Mr LeMoncheck came to Sibeam from Silicon Image, a Silicon Valley company that developed the HDMI standard, and obviously feels Sibeam has more potential.

“Connectors never seem to disappear from the back of TVs, you are seeing two, three or four HDMI connectors right now. But you only need one of our transceivers in a TV and you’re done. As consumers understand that, the need for lots of HDMI ports goes down,” he said.

Like HDMI, WirelessHD has pulled together an industry consortium - 40 members so far, with 60 more in the process of signing up. Its secure 1.0 standard is now in place after being delayed a little by Hollywood’s concerns about movies being beamed across apartment blocks by the technology.

Wireless chipmakers Intel and Broadcom have signed up, but SiBeam feels it can compete with the larger players due to the seven-year headstart of expertise it has built up since the company was founded. Mass production will begin this quarter.

Panasonic and Samsung have already been touting the virtues of Wireless HD and the big CE players are expected to unveil products at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January.

Mr LeMoncheck says the aim is to give the technology to consumers at the same price as what a long HDMI cable would cost. This is an even better deal for the TV makers, as they are selling it themselves as an added integrated cost of the TV, rather than giving that sale away to an HDMI cable maker.

HDMI holds sway for now and other wireless standards like UWB and WHDI may challenge, but WirelessHD seems to have reached a critical mass of support from the industry.

October 2, 2008 12:33am in Consumer Electronics, Digital media, Hardware | Comment

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