Future Wireless

Airport (also known as 802.11 or Wi-Fi) has been extremely successful since launched in 1999. It was in fact far more successful than many in the industry expected and the result was driven more by consumers than industry. Industry has noticed this level of demand and now the race to improve on Wi-Fi is on. The original Wi-Fi was 802.11b, labelled Airport by Apple. It functioned at 11 megabits per second over a 150 foot area. This split into two standards in the forms of 802.11a and 802.11g with the 802.11g standard gaining a stronger foothold due to its compatibility with the original 802.11b. 802.11g works at 54 megabits per second with the same range.

On the horizon are a variety of competing standards. They do not all compete directly with Wi-Fi, but the landscape is going to be effected by the success of the various upcoming standards.

Bluetooth is already here and used as a replacement for USB to talk to small devices such as PDAs, keyboards, and cellular phones. It is popular because it does not require much power (so doesn't cause unwanted drain on a cell phone battery) and in inexpensive. Bluetooth EDR will start becoming available in 2005 and will increase the speed of the current Bluetooth significantly.

Wi-Fi itself is expected to increase in speed again in the form of 802.11n, probably crossing the 100 megabit per second margin by 2006. Apple will undoubtedly continue to embrace both Bluetooth and Wi-Fi in their future products since they have already developed a significant history of support for both.

WiMax is a standard that will be widely available by 2007 and is backed by many big technology players. It will be similar in speed to Wi-Fi at the time it is released, but instead of working over a short range of over a hundred feet, WiMax will work over miles. It can be anticipated that WiMax might have a very dramatic effect on all areas of the communcations industry from cell phones to broadband providers.

Ultrawideband (UWB) is another developing standard that has legs. It was originally a military project dating to the 1960s. It will be a far more direct competitor to Wi-Fi as it features a similar limit in range but has significantly higher bandwidth in the range of 480 megabits per second upstream and an entire gigabit per second downstream! This performance levels can allow for new functionality such as wireless transmission of video signals in a local network such as from your Mac to a TV or to connect your Mac to drive storage wirelessly instead of over Firewire. In May, the two UWB standards were unable to combine into a single standard to move forward. This now leaves the industry with the promise of two competing standards ready for 2006.

Wireless Firewire has also been finalized in 2004 and should be coming to market in 2005. Its features place it in direct competition to UWB.

All of these standards have potential to have a huge impact on our industry and our daily workflows. No matter what the final outcome, the reduction in wires and the continuing advanced of digital convergence will be driven further.