SANTA CLARA, Calif. — Competing approaches to delivering high quality video in the digital home faced off in a panel discussion at the Connections conference here Thursday (June 26).
Representatives of WiFi, ultrawideband and 60-GHz radios generally made nice, suggesting all their technologies will co-exist in different systems for different applications. However it was also clear each is gunning for similar applications and design wins in TVs, routers, set-top boxes, Blu-Ray drives and other devices.
John LeMoncheck, president of startup SiBeam, said he doesn't expect to see conflict even though developers of next-generation Wi-Fi are targeting the same 60 GHz band where his chips operate. Kelly Davis-Felner, a marketing director for the Wi-Fi Alliance, agreed that many wireless technologies will live in harmony.
It's hard to tell which approach will gain more traction than the others at this point, but getting design wins is the focus, said Bruce Watkins, president of Pulse~Link. He pointed out that when he wrote the company's business plan in 2002 few people were using Wi-Fi and HomeRF and HiperLAN were all the rage.
