All Battles Start in the Home

By By Jim Barthold

With apologies to George Orwell, telecommunications home networking is beginning to resemble Animal Farm, to wit: "Wires Good, Wireless Bad" seems to be a growing video transport mantra.

Unlike the humans in Animal Farm, the wireless guys can't be dismissed despite the best efforts of wired home networking proponents. Just this week a star-studded cast of consumer electronics manufacturers – in alphabetical order, LG Electronics, Matsushita Electric Industrial (better known as Panasonic), NEC, Samsung Electronics, SiBeam, Sony and Toshiba - said they were working together as a special interest group (SIG) to promote the yet another wireless home networking specification, WirelessHD.

WirelessHD uses 7 GHz of unlicensed bandwidth in the 60 GHz spectrum to deliver what proponents hope will eventually be 50 Gb data payloads – realistically they're projecting 25 Mb - across spaces confined to about 10 meters. That's a big room for most homes outside the NBA fraternity, but it's still considered an in-room solution to move high bandwidth audio/video data among a new slew of consumer electronics devices.

Remember the CE support

"The key thing is that this is unique in that it's applications-specific; it's supported by several large CE industry players; it will be interoperable; it takes advantage of a frequency band that has a huge amount of spectral availability for multi-gigabit data streams; and it's uncompressed," said Lianne Caetano, executive director of the WirelessHD SIG.

The spec is being tweaked to handle inconveniences like the data drop-off over the very short distances that occur when using such a high frequency band.

"We'll have a smart antenna system (that) takes advantage of the reflections in the room like bouncing off walls to get to its intended recipient," Caetano said.

Not surprisingly, the WirelessHD announcement had both wireless and wireline networkers bouncing off walls. It dropped a pair of fine leather gloves at the feet of wireless technologies such as Ultra Wide Band (UWB) and, to a much lesser extent, Bluetooth and sent a circuit spoke through wireline players like MoCA (Multimedia over Coax Alliance), which has its own war going on with folks like HomePlug.

Caetano drew some WirelessHD battle lines by noting that the specification is "complementary not only with wireline but with Wi-Fi. Those technologies are great for transferring content among the many rooms in a home."

MoCA percolating

To a point, Ladd Wardani, president of MoCA, agreed. On a very specific point – video content - however, he vehemently disagreed, pointing out: "You cannot use unlicensed wireless for these no-excuses premium services video. MoCA is the guaranteed link; Wi-Fi is to go to laptops and things like that (and) eventually handheld devices. A consumer's expectation is very different on wireless."

Wardani is probably right that consumers won't tolerate glitchy video on their TV sets as they will on portable devices like cell phones and PDAs. On the other hand, as wireless has shown with everything from remote controls to telephones, no one wants to be tethered, and that's why seven CE heavyweights are backing WirelessHD.

"This is the first time that leading CE companies have come together to create a specification for interoperable wireless specs for a wireless high definition digital interface that will enable true uncompressed baseband audio/video streaming on consumer electronics devices," Caetano said.

CE vendors, she said, have some very specific needs.

"They require this technology to be able to stream uncompressed video; they need this technology to provide a quality viewing experience for the customer; it has to be available at mass market pricing; and it has to have low power options for the more portable devices vs. the display," she said.

Realistically, said Wardani, they should be looking for one more thing: licensed spectrum.

"In an unlicensed band, the service provider has no control over what's going to happen," he said. "It's broken, from a business model; from an installation model, it doesn't work. There's nothing wrong with wireless video … in a licensed band."

In other words, and again apologies to Orwell, "Wireless Good, Wireline Better."

- Jim Barthold

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