Future of Wireless Connectivity

Replacement of wire with wireless links had been a holy grail for quite sometime. Cordless phones, a relic from 1980’s, is a testament to this urge of human society. With the advent of personal computers, the jumble of wires in an average house has grown manifold. Consumers have waited long for a solution to relieve them from the ever growing hassle of wiring their computers, TV, DVD, set-top-boxes and sound systems. The knowledge gained in the last decade has propelled a slew of start ups to make our world cable free.

For the uninitiated, when we talk about wireless connectivity, we refer to two different types of networks called WLAN and WPAN. For short ranges up to 10m, devices communicating with each other are part of Wireless Personal Area Network (WPAN). Distance larger than 10m is covered under the rubric of Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN). WiFi (based on IEEE 802.11 standard) with around 100 Mbps and Bluetooth with 3 Mbps have come to dominate the WLAN and WPAN space respectively.

Unfortunately, as it exists today, neither the WiFi nor the Bluetooth has the throughput to replace the cables from our high end audio visual consumer equipment. Sensing an opportunity, startups like Quantenna and Amimon have developed the MIMO platform on the foundation of 802.11. They are claiming transmission rates of 0.6-3 Gbps. With the provided chipsets, OEM/ODM can make their DVD, set-top-box and display units wireless and accessible from anywhere in the house.

In the last five years, ultra-wideband (UWB) technology has materialized to address the WPAN. With lower energy per bit than WiFi, UWB has long promised to be a superior technology. UWB based on MB-OFDM can deliver 0.48Gbps over short distances. When the UWB development started, it specified a data rate that was an order magnitude higher than anything that WiFi had to offer. In the interim, proprietary WiFi solutions from Quantenna and Amimon has caught up and more importantly moved ahead of the UWB in terms of throughput. However, it remains to be seen whether these MIMO based solutions can be competitive with UWB on cost and power consumption. At least, in one respect, WiFi do have an advantage and that is its better coverage range.

UWB, so far, has been unable to penetrate the market even with the 2nd generation of products. There is a significant risk that it can be squeezed out of the space by the high speed variants of WiFi from one side and more ominously from the multi-Gbps short range solution from SiBEAM on the other side.

We will have to wait and see who is going to become the next CSR and Atheros in the new generation of wireless connectivity. The heated race is on.