Raising WiFi's Speed limit (09/05/2006)

What are the limits to wireless speeds?

We were pleased to see the Boston Globe pick up on this theme with their article on boosting the WiFi speed limit. They also had a nice quote from NETGEAR about what consumers will use that extra speed for:

Vivek Pathela, vice president of product marketing at the WiFi networking company Netgear Inc., said that TV makers have been experimenting with WiFi-N for over a year. ''They're very keen on realizing wireless transmission," said Pathela, because it would allow a single digital video recorder to serve TVs throughout a house.
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All this comes as the Hollywood studios have begun selling movie downloads over the Internet, and major TV networks rebroadcast their shows online. The makers of WiFi products based on the new Draft-N standard sense most people will want to view their videos on a big TV set, rather than on a computer monitor, and innovators like NETGEAR are moving to faster WiFi technology to make it happen.

Draft-N boasts speeds as high as 270 million bits per second. Pathela acknowledged real-world speeds will be much lower -- maybe just half the maximum. But that's still enough to support high-definition wireless TV. And "there's still room for improvement," Pathela said. In theory, he said, Draft-N could perform up to 600 million bits per second.

Who knows; maybe that someday there will be WiFi-Z that’s even faster than that?