Petteri Pyyny
28 Jan 2004 13:58
Consumer electronics organization, The Multiband OFDM Alliance, has announced that they expect to finish standards of Ultra Wideband technology by end of May and expect to deliver first products by early 2005.
The technology allows transmitting much, much larger amounts of data than technologies such as Wireless LAN (even more than WLAN's -- or WiFi's -- upcoming versions that push the bandwidth to over 100Mbps), but within smaller range. Technology is aimed to deliver full TV-quality video and other data wirelessly from consumer electronic products to other consumer electronic products. Typical example being a DVD player that can send video directly to TV without any cables connecting two devices. Such applications for PCs to connect to VGA monitors do exist already and they typically use heavy video compression and 802.11b or 802.11g WiFi technologies, but can't handle in all the circumstances the amount of data that DVD playback requires. And the requirements are much higher for transmitting HDTV quality video that Japan and United States are rapidly shifting to use.
The Multiband OFDM Alliance members include world's largest cell phone manufacturer, Finnish Nokia, Japanese electronics giant Matsushita and American chip maker Texas Instruments.
Source: NYTimes.com (requires registration)