But technology hampered by regulatory hurdles, a clash over standards
By Hiawatha Bray, Globe Staff *|* June 25, 2004
The space shuttle videos looked almost better than the real thing. They were high-definition videos, on display earlier this month at the Sheraton Boston Hotel. And though there's nothing unusual these days about high-definition television, these two videos came from an unusual source -- a laptop computer in one corner of a medium-sized conference room.
The laptop was plugged into a black box bearing two small antennas; similar boxes were plugged into the HDTV monitors. The result was a wireless network powerful enough to broadcast two different high-definition videos simultaneously, with enough leftover capacity to handle a third channel.
Those black boxes were built by Freescale Semiconductor, a division of Motorola Corp. The microchips inside them can pump out 110 million bits of data per second -- twice as much as the fastest WiFi wireless networking equipment now on the market. And that's just the beginning. Before the year's out, Freescale will be making chips that run twice as fast; by next year, it plans to offer a slice of silicon that will broadcast wireless data at one billion bits per second.
Freescale is one of the leaders in a new kind of digital technology called "ultrawideband" that's being described as the next big consumer wireless technology, thanks to its ability to pump out massive amounts of data. But even though some ultrawideband devices will come to market this year, the technology is still hobbled by regulatory challenges and a long-running clash between two incompatible ultrawideband systems. According to Bob Heile, the Attleboro physicist who leads a wireless standards-setting committee for the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), "Right now, it's 10 percent technology and 90 percent politics."
http://www.boston.com/business/technology/articles/2004/06/25/the_next_big_thing_is_actually_ultrawide/
By Hiawatha Bray, Globe Staff *|* June 25, 2004
The space shuttle videos looked almost better than the real thing. They were high-definition videos, on display earlier this month at the Sheraton Boston Hotel. And though there's nothing unusual these days about high-definition television, these two videos came from an unusual source -- a laptop computer in one corner of a medium-sized conference room.
The laptop was plugged into a black box bearing two small antennas; similar boxes were plugged into the HDTV monitors. The result was a wireless network powerful enough to broadcast two different high-definition videos simultaneously, with enough leftover capacity to handle a third channel.
Those black boxes were built by Freescale Semiconductor, a division of Motorola Corp. The microchips inside them can pump out 110 million bits of data per second -- twice as much as the fastest WiFi wireless networking equipment now on the market. And that's just the beginning. Before the year's out, Freescale will be making chips that run twice as fast; by next year, it plans to offer a slice of silicon that will broadcast wireless data at one billion bits per second.
Freescale is one of the leaders in a new kind of digital technology called "ultrawideband" that's being described as the next big consumer wireless technology, thanks to its ability to pump out massive amounts of data. But even though some ultrawideband devices will come to market this year, the technology is still hobbled by regulatory challenges and a long-running clash between two incompatible ultrawideband systems. According to Bob Heile, the Attleboro physicist who leads a wireless standards-setting committee for the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), "Right now, it's 10 percent technology and 90 percent politics."
http://www.boston.com/business/technology/articles/2004/06/25/the_next_big_thing_is_actually_ultrawide/
