George thanKS for your report I bought Ciena at 13 5/8 and sold 1/3 of my Tellabs. anyway what you think of This claim
Motorola's hot wireless TV plan
By Tom Steinert-Threlkeld, ZDNet
Motorola Inc. is about to bring out of its laboratories a technology in development for five years that allows lifelike interactive
television signals to be sent and received wirelessly and instantaneously.
Motorola believes it is "years ahead of anyone else" in exploiting parts of the radio spectrum that would allow delivery of
interactive television services wirelessly. According to Rudyard Istvan, the company's corporate director of strategy, the
technology can operate in nearly any slice of spectrum ranging from 5 billion to 60 billion cycles, or hertz, per second.
At present, Motorola appears to be focusing on what Istvan calls a "very, very interesting band" of spectrum that lies just below
60 gigahertz. The company envisions selling huge volumes of small antennae - possibly the size of thermostats - that would be
scattered across corporate campuses, public places and streets roughly 15 feet apart, as well as microchips to handle signals
and process video.
Istvan said Motorola would propose its architecture for this system, which it calls Piano, as an industry standard for delivering
high-speed wireless data among personal computers, servers, personal digital assistants, notebook PCs and other digital
devices. Using Piano as a standard is being proposed to the Bluetooth Special Interest Group, a consortium of wireless
communications and computing companies founded in May by IBM Corp., Intel Corp., Nokia Corp., Telefon AB L.M.
Ericsson and Toshiba Corp.
While Motorola has not publicly discussed the Piano architecture, the company said it considers the technology to be ready to
roll out. "We wouldn't be proposing it [as a standard] if we didn't feel we could implement it now," Istvan said.
If adopted, the impact "could be quite large" on data networks, Istvan said. He expects Piano first to extend the use of
company networks to the exchange on an instant's notice of video and other multimedia data.
Making that possible will be a set of low-cost chips, likely to cost less than $100, that will handle the wireless signals being sent
and received from computing and communications devices to the microcell antennae. Also critical to Motorola's plans are new
generations of its Merlin digital signal processing chips, which the company expects to have operating at 1 billion cycles per
second next year. At that speed, Istvan said, the Merlin chips will be able to compress and decompress motion-picture-quality
video without delay, allowing live videoconferences and other video communications to be conducted on a wireless network.
The creation of room-sized cells is necessary for the wireless distribution of video if radio waves in or near the 60-GHz band
are used because of the characteristics of higher frequencies on the radio spectrum, said Shea Silidker, consultant in the
personal communications unit of The Strategis Group Inc. in Washington, D.C. The higher the frequency, the lower the range of
signals. To date, most efforts at delivering high-speed data wirelessly have been in the 28-GHz to 38-GHz area.
This is uncharted territory. But Motorola has been a pioneer of cellular telephone service, and the Piano architecture is
"philosophically" - although not technically - similar to Motorola's efforts to launch satellite networks that can deliver telephone
calls, television programming and Internet data. Its Iridium phone network is entering commercial service now; and, the
Teledesic LLC network - an Internet in the sky - is set to start up in 2003.
Ubiquity for the Piano architecture, though, would mean millions of cells in any major market. But just because the company
can begin to deliver the technology and expects it to find acceptance first on corporate networks doesn't ensure its success,
said Jane Zweig, executive vice president of Herschel Shosteck Associates Ltd., a wireless consulting firm.
"This is really its first effort in this arena," Zweig said. The corporate data network "is going to be a fierce battleground for
Motorola."
Other wireless players like Ericsson gear providers, such as Lucent Technologies Inc. and Northern Telecom Ltd., also will
zero in on providing high-speed wireless networking technology and wired data networks.
See Also:
Get help for your computer problems at the Help! Channel
Read hot news at ZDNN
Work from home? Get good advice from the Small Business Advisor
Index
|
Top Stories
|
Business
|
Tech
|
Politics
|
World
|
Local
|
Entertainment
|
Sports
|
Science
|
Health
Questions or Comments
Copyright © 1998 ZDNet. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part in any form or medium without express written permission of
ZDNet is prohibited. ZDNet and the ZDNet logo are trademarks of Ziff-Davis P |
