Wireless Home Networking - Index of

Chapter 19: More Than Ten Devices to Connect to Your Wireless Network
Other gear in your home theater is also going wireless. For instance, Denon
(www.denon.com) has its AVR-4308CI Advanced 7.1 Channel Home Theater/
MultiMedia A/V Receiver with Ethernet networking and 802.11b/g Wi-Fi on
board. The Wi-Fi not only gives you access to streaming media but also lets
you log in remotely to your receiver.
802.11n, which we cover in detail in Chapter 2, has been designed specifically
to support multimedia networking among all the devices in the home. We
expect to see this become standard in at least midrange and high-end A/V
gear in the next few years.
Cables? Who needs them?
Another and quite different wireless change looming on the horizon is wireless
cabling. You may not care much about wireless cabling until you put that
50-inch LCD on the wall and realize that there’s an HDMI cable coming down
the wall — serious spousal issues on that one!
Wireless HDMI comes to the rescue. Wireless HDMI is exactly what it sounds
like — a wireless high-definition multimedia interface that links your HDMI
port on your TV to your HDMI output on your satellite box, A/V receiver, PS3,
or whatever. Wireless HDMI is not a standard per se, but many early implementations
are coming to market using ultra wideband (UWB) under the
WiMedia standard. Early wireless HDMI chipsets can use the WiMedia UWB
standard to deliver more than 300 Mbps of sustained throughput for in-room
coverage. The theoretical maximum throughput of UWB is 480 Mbps. At this
rate, Wireless HDMI will have to compress the HD signal.
A group of consumer electronics kingpins got together in 2005 to form the
WirelessHD Consortium aimed at developing a noncompressed wireless standard
for high-definition audio/video transmission. Instead of UWB, the WiHD
standard uses the 60 GHz band to offer HD content without the need for compression.
Instead of providing up to 300 Mbps using UWB, WiHD reportedly
will transmit at 5 Gbps.
Wireless HDMI technologies will be available to consumers first. The first
WiHD products will hit the market sometime in 2008. Gefen, for instance, has
its Wireless HDMI Extender (www.gefen.com, $699), offering transmission of
high-definition video (for you video geeks, the system supports up to 1080p
at 30 fps, or 1080i at 60 fps, at distances up to 33 feet). Gefen does compress
the signal, using lossy JPEG 2000 compression, and the resulting image quality
will be less than that of wired HDMI. However, until there’s more experience
with the product in the field (in different wireless environments), we
won’t know how much is lost. For $699, we’re counting on it being minimal!
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