These standards issues are very important considering the amount of money the communications industry will be spending the next couple of years to deploy new services. The RBOCs certainly don't want to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on ADSL equipment only to find out a year later that the equipment they just bought is obsolete or that the industry has decided to adopt a different standard. Similar issues face the cable industry. Imagine the costs associated with upgrading headend equipment or millions of set-top boxes. The cellular industry is also in a similar predicament. Right now the standard is TDMA, tomorrow its going to be CDMA, and after that, who knows.
What is needed and what the communications industry is now beginning to seek is a silver bullet to deal with the mess that is being brought about by the rapid rate of technological change. Witness the recent request for proposal (RFP) sent out by Tele-TV (a joint venture of Bell Atlantic, Nynex, and Pacific Telesis group) for a "unity" set-top box. The potential suppliers have been told that the box should be able to handle "Asynchronous Digital Subscriber Line, switched digital, hybrid fiber coax, direct broadcast and other technologies." In other words, they want a general purpose broadband communications device.
Enter the MediaProcessor from the private startup MicroUnity. The general purpose processors in our PCs are able to perform a myriad of different functions by virture of the fact that they are programmable (i.e software driven). Like these general purpose processors, the MediaProcessor is also programmable. Unlike them however, the MediaProcessor has the extremely high throughput necessary to become a general purpose broadband communications processor. With a clock rate of up to 1GHz and computing bandwidth a couple of orders of magnitude greater than todays Pentium, it can be programmed to perform the modulation/compression for DMT, CAP, QAM, QPSK, V.34, H.324, MPEG2 or whatever.
The MediaProcessor is a radical new idea, but one whose time has certainly come. They have some technical and cost barriers to overcome, but I think MicroUnity will have a very significant impact on the industry and could obsolete the inflexible and very specific solutions being offered by Westell, Amati, etc. Check them out at microunity.com |
