• MOST READ

• LATEST NEWS

The battle to control the wireless network that transports HD video round the home is becoming very real, with many large players supporting Wi-Fi even as they keep a watching brief on more offside options such as WHDI or the 60GHz bands (WirelessHD or WiGig, the latter itself based on Wi-Fi). Companies like Quantenna, Airties and Celeno are finding real operator uptake in conventional Wi-Fi bands, and will be able to move smoothly to the upcoming 802.11ac standard extension, which adds HD capability. Indeed, start-up Quantenna has just announced what looks like its biggest ever design win, with Motorola.

The US vendor is dipping its toe in the water of Wi-Fi for in-home video transport, starting off with a wireless video bridge, the VAP 2400, built using Quantenna’s 4x4 MIMO chip. The concept of a wireless video bridge has only been around for under a year, and this one, like others on the horizon, claims to use beamforming to make the connection, using the high number of channels available in 5GHz unlicensed spectrum, rather than being stuck to the original 2.4GHz Wi-Fi band.

In Quantenna’s approach to HD WLans, there appears to be little attempt to accommodate video specifically – instead, the firm takes a ‘brute force’ approach, taking the full MIMO 802.11n standard and making sure there is virtually zero placket loss, regardless of the type of data that it is being sent. By contrast, rival platforms from Celeno in Israel and Airties in Turkey have focused on firmware to look specifically at current channel capacity and map video capacity onto it, rather than simply creating a better series of channels. Airties uses off-the-shelf Broadcom 2x2 MIMO chips while Celeno has had great success with its own MIMO chip using up to six antennas at each end.

Quantenna has been working on its chip since at least 2008 and launched it last January at the Consumer Electronics Show, when it was claimed to be the only full specification 802.11n chipset to include 4x4 MIMO, dynamic digital beamforming, mesh networking and channel optimization. It claims to support multiple concurrent video streams from ultra-low latency H.264 up to Blu-ray quality video, across 200-foot distances. It can also be used for applications such as online bidirectional videogame controllers, and can operate in point-to-multipoint mode. The Motorola product will harness that point-to-multipoint capability, enabling it to reach any TV in the home.

Quantenna’s win at Motorola will disappoint Celeno, but there were few other 4x4, PMP choices apart from Qualcomm, which has a platform built around the technology it acquired with Airgo. Other Wi-Fi chip majors such as Atheros (also being acquired by Qualcomm), Marvell, Ralink (acquired a few weeks back by Mediatek) and Lantiq have so far stopped at 3x3 and Broadcom still appears to be happy with its chip performance at just 2x2.

Pages: 1 | 2

COMMENTS

No comments yet. Be the first to add a comment!

Carrier Broadband Performance: Africa & Middle East
Carriers are using mobile broadband as their weapon of choice in the fight against the commoditization of voice and falling ARPU. This...

Voice over LTE: Market Analysis and Forecasts
VoLTE offer unique advantages in lowering a carrier's voice infrastructure economics and promises to improve voice quality, device...