Wireless HD Delivery Race Heats Up

Third Group Enters Fray With High-Speed Solution

by George Winslow -- Multichannel News, 5/27/2009 2:54:50 PM

With two groups already touting competing technologies for the wireless transmission of high-definition content in the home, a third group, the Wireless Gigabit (WiGig) Alliance, is stepping up its efforts and has said it will compete with a specification for its own high-speed wireless solution by the end of the year.

The WiGig Alliance, backed by a number of major computer, semiconductor and consumer-electronics companies, was set up to spur the development of a wide variety of consumer devices that would be capable of wirelessly sending HD programming, data and other content over 60 Gigahertz (GHz) spectrum at speeds 10 times faster than current wireless networks, explained Mark Grodzinsky, chair of the marketing working group for WiGig Alliance and vice president of marketing for member company Wilocity.

If WiGig Alliance can complete its so-called WiGig Specification this year, the group hopes to put together an infrastructure to test and certify devices by the second half of 2010. That means consumer products using its 60 GHz technologies won't hit the market until the latter part of 2010 or 2011.

The plans by WiGig Alliance and two other competing groups -- the WirelessHD Consortium and the Wireless Home Digital Interface (WHDI) -- are important because they highlight growing interest in wireless technologies to move HD content around the home.

While consumers have rapidly embraced wireless technologies, bandwidth limitations make it impossible to quickly transmit HD programming and other large files over current wireless networks, Grodzinsky said.

Wireless technologies using the 60-GHz spectrum would overcome that problem. "They can achieve the multi-Gigabit-per-second speeds you need to move that kind of content," he said.

The group's board members include consumer-electronics manufacturers like LG, Panasonic, Samsung and NEC, as well as such semiconductor firms Atheros Communications, Broadcom, Intel, Marvell Technology Group, MediaTek and Wilocity, Grodzinsky noted. Cell-phone maker Nokia is also a member.

Grodzinsky stressed, however, that the group's efforts weren't limited to transmitting HD content and that its specification would allow a wide array of small handheld mobile devices, PCs and mobile phones, as well as TVs and video players, to communicate with each other at very high speeds.

While high-speed wireless technologies have attracted a lot of interest, it is too early to say which of the competing groups and technologies is likely to triumph. Some major manufacturers appear to have hedged their bets by joining more than one group. Samsung, for example, is a member of all three groups.

WHDI, which claims to be the furthest along in bringing products to the market, uses the unlicensed 5-GHz spectrum. Signals sent over the 5-GHz spectrum travel further than signals sent over 60 GHz, which are generally limited in range to one room.

As a result, the WHDI solution is capable of sending HD content throughout the home. But the bandwidth limitations of the 5-GHz spectrum mean it can't transmit all the bits that make up the HD stream.

"You can't see the difference in the image quality but you can't do data networking with a technology that drops some bits and sends other bits so their technology is inherently going to be used for distributing video," Grodzinsky argued. "They can do IP networks but the speeds would be much lower than what they can achieve for video."

Like the WiGig Alliance, the competing WirelessHD Consortium also uses the 60 GHz spectrum, which allows uncompressed HD content to be transmitted between TVs, set-top boxes and other devices at very high data rates.

"The WirelessHD Consortium has been very focused on removing the HDMI cable but they haven't focused on IP-networking or on servicing multiple devices," Grodzinsky said. "While streaming uncompressed video is very important for the WiGig alliance, it is equally important that we have technology to serve all these platforms. That is how I would differentiate our group."