Siemens Home and Office Communications Devices unveiled their UWB home content distribution solution TelcoTV in Dallas, Texas this week. They've teamed with Silicon Valley-based Tzero Technologies to bring out a solution targeted at service providers to deliver next-generation broadband services, including the almighty IPTV, to subscribers without having to deal with new cabling in the home. They expect to put out the first prototypes for engineers to poke at by the end of the year.
Service providers, especially phone companies looking to deliver TV over DSL or fiber, hate new in-home cabling. It typically means truck rolls, lots of time to install it, lots of headaches and "You wanted another TV jack where?" High-speed wireless – aka UWB – is supposed to deliver high-speed connectivity without all the cable fuss. The new Siemens set-top box is supposed to provide local transmission speeds up to 480 Mbps to support even the most heavy-duty demands of high-definition video and IPTV. Or even high-definition video delivered over IPTV, of course.
Tzero Technologies is a fabless semiconductor company that provides the chips, reference designs, and even evaluation kits to implement UWB solutions. The TZ 7000 chipset provides a complete solution in an all CMOS-chipset, including a radio and mixed-signals baseband with an integrated MAC and PHY plus QoS with guaranteed bandwidth reservation, and is designed to operate in noisy environments with your good friends in 2.4 and 5GHZ, including the microwave oven and 802.11 a/b/g/n devices. Standards junkies will appreciate that the TZ 7000 supports the WiMedia Alliance MAC and PHY protocols and QoS, so the Siemens device should play well with other UWB WiMedia-compliant devices.
It doesn't hurt that Tzero is also working with Analog Devices to do UWB designs for connecting HDMI devices wirelessly. So, in theory, your next-generation HDTV or other high-quality display, DVD player, DVR, game system, and other devices will be able to talk to each other and move around quality video without a rat's nest of cables; just a whole bunch of frobs hanging off the back for "this year" devices with chips ultimately built into boxes in 2007 and 2008.
Back to this WiMedia thing. WiMedia's UWB solution is also supposed to be rolled into wireless USB, 1394 "Firewire" and Bluetooth. Specs are listed at 480 Mbps at up to 3 meters and a drop off of speeds as you go out to 10 meters. Intel, Kodak and Aleron have already run demos where pictures from a digital camera can be immediately zapped to a PC and if you can do it with a PC, you can just as easily do it with a printer.
Why do people love the UWB WiMedia so much? Well, aside from speeds that put 802.11n to shame, UWB burns a lot less power than Wi-Fi, so putting it into a camera or a PDA or into Microsoft's next try at a non-laptop laptop for the home makes a lot more sense than the energy drain you get from using Wi-Fi.
