Here comes wireless home theater. With the
recent FCC approval of Ultra-Wideband Technology (UWB) for manufacture by Freescale Semiconductor, the floodgates of high-bandwidth products for the home theater may have just been opened. Ultra-Wideband, or UWB, Technology is the new 802.15.3 standard which, in this application, allows over 110 megabits per second (Mbps) - that's the equivalent of about 71 T-1 lines (just short of an OC3 line). Let's put this in perpective:
An entire 4.7GB DVD could be sent over the wireless connection in just over 5 minutes.
You could stream 9 PCM stereo tracks simultaneously
You could stream 24 DVDs at average bitrate (4.5Mbps)
You could stream 5 HDTV channels at 20Mbps bandwidth
Now, does this mean that by 2005 everything will be wireless? Well, no - afterall, 802.11* has 54Mbps so this is simply another leap in the right direction - but one that was necessary to enable home theater products to send sufficient data over wireless networks. The larger goal for UWB,
at least according to Intel, is to enable it to wrap other technologies such as BlueTooth, 1394, UPnP, and WUSB for a truly unified connnectivity. Our followup questions will have to do with range, error correction, connection negotiation, and reliability of the system for use as a means of transmitting the already compressed technologies we utilize for audio and video content today.
Get Info on UWB Technology...
