The Ruckus Room

No More Consumer Wi-Fi?

There's a good chance in 5 years or so you won't be able to purchase Wi-Fi products in retail. 

Wi-Fi chip makers are seriously considering the possibility and making changes to their business models to reflect this change. 

But why? Because Wi-Fi will be delivered through a different channel.  The service providers.

I just upgraded my AT&T broadband to a new 3 Mbps "bundled" service that includes static IP addresses, DirecTV service and a bunch of voice features.  When the technician arrived (after hours and hours on the phone trying to get him there), he replaced my broadband gateway and Apple Airport with a 2Wire router that has 802.11g integrated. 

When I asked why he said that AT&T wanted to guarantee service quality of all the services and was interested in providing a number of different ways to move "digital services" around the home.

Wi-Fi technology will become part of the home infrastucture.  It's already making its way into music players, speakers, gateways, set top boxes, etc.  As a result, as a retail product, Wi-Fi will effectively cease to exist.  Perhaps not tomorrow but a couple days after tomorrow.

New technology is now letting operators not only integrate Wi-Fi but control things they haven't been able to control before.  Things such as signal path selection, being able to see into the home RF spectrum, allocate different SSIDs for different services, prioritize traffic, monitor packet error rates, SNR, signal strength in different areas of the home.  Blah, blah, blah.

But still, because Wi-Fi operates in an unlicensed band, operators take a pessimistic approach to its use in the home.  For the time being, operators will depend on wired solutions such as MOCA and HPNA to "absolutely ensure service delivery" (as one Bellhead recently stated) over the last 100 feet. 

And they'll use Wi-Fi for the corner cases such as hard to reach TVs or problem areas where they can't get wires. But watch out. 

Wi-Fi is making huge advances with the advent of 802.11n and technology that makes N more reliable.  In our labs, we've been able to put our smart antenna and QoS technology on top of 802.11n chips to get a very reliable (worst case) 50 Mbps+ to almost any corner of the home.  This means concurrent HD streams to three different TVs.

This is going to happen.  You read it here (if you're here and still reading), first.

A Frustrating Digital Life

If you like to talk to consumers, then go to this show (Ziff Davis's Digital Life).  We did and man was it frustrating.

We showed the an HDTV demo over Wi-Fi showing an MPEG-2 HD stream (18.5 Mbps data rate over 802.11g) of Victoria's Secret Runway Show (you must see it - it's simply breathtaking). But then you had to explain to them what was going on. This was a 30 minute conversation and was like going to the dentist without Novocaine.

Most consumers don't know the first thing about moving digital information around their home.  They merely want to buy a plasma TV that they can put on their wall, plug it in and voila!  No wires (other than power). No set top boxes (consumers don't know what these are anyway).  No converters.  Nothing.  In their minds, boxes and wires are from Satan.  And they're right.  But the problem is all the stuff that needs to happen to MAKE this happen.

When a TV signal comes into your home it is typically encoded. Encoding is the process of transforming information from one format into another.  Encoding transforms a signal into a form optimized for transmission or storage and is generally performed with a codec.  Encoding can also (and typically) provides some sort of compression and/or encryption. The opposite operation is called decoding.

But most TVs aren't computers and can't deal with "encoded" digital information.  This is one of the reasons why set top boxes are required.  Set top boxes (STB) decode the digital stream and present it to the TV with the requisite connector and connections that the TV supports. STBs also let you change channels. 

Then the problem is how do you get these signals to the STB?  More and more companies are moving to the Internet Protocol (IP) to do this.  This is because IP is a well know and pervasive transport protocol.  However now you have to have this encoded TV signal "encapsulated" into IP (if it isn't already...IPTV).  Most STBs now have an Ethernet jack on the back of the device.  So if you have Ethernet running though out your home, you're golden. Do you have Ethernet running throughout your home? To simplify things, we've made a device that allow consumers to use Wi-Fi to do this.

The problem is now the consumer has three different boxes (set top box to decode, a Wi-Fi device to get IPTV into it  and a TV) they must muck with.  They want these devices combined into what. But then what do you have?  A computer without a keyboard.  And (right now) if a company was to build this device, consumers wouldn't want to pay the price.  Can you say frustrating?

But this is where things are headed.  People want to be able to view pictures, Internet content, real-time TV, download movies and even play music on their TVs without having to plug a computer to do it.  While we're not quite there yet, if we listen to consumers, they will help us figure things out - as painful as it is to deal with them (I'm talking to myself now).

Apple's Set Top Box

That's what it is. 

In previous posts we've alluded to Apple moving into the home multimedia market.  And that's exactly what they're doing. 

These guys are smart.  They want to be the central hub or center for digital multimedia.  And why not? 

They've pretty much wrote the book on it and redefined how everyone on the planet listens to music.

This device is designed to be an interface between the network and the TV with the ability to receive an IP transmission, decode the digital signal for an analog TV and provide storage (like a PVR/DVR...read TIVO).

It sports an Ethernet jack, RCA connectors and HDMI interface and integrated Wi-Fi.  We believe it has some sort of pre-N Wi-Fi cuz that's now what they're equipping their new iMACs with.

The only problem is their Wi-Fi support. If you're merely receiving a big-ass file, storing it and playing on a TV later, then their Wi-Fi is probably fine.  But if you're trying to stream multicast IPTV or MP3s or any real-time isochronous traffic, it should suck. 

Their Wi-Fi support has no was to mitigate interference, adequately support multicast or prioritize video traffic over any other traffic.  Putting our smart antenna stuff into their Airport and into this iTV box would solve all this.

Apple (or at least one of Apple's chief scientists...Stuart Cheshire) have looked into our technology and here's what they (he) thinks.   But the problem is Apple seems to think that 802.11n is the panacea.  It isn't  Here's why.

In any event, it's only becoming more and more apparent that consumers must deal with building IP networks in their home (which is one of the reasons why Cisco purchased Scientific Atlanta).  This means Ethernet cabling all over, IP over powerline (yuk), HPNA over coax or Wi-Fi. 

And we know what consumers want. :)