HD wi-fi crashes the home-networking party

New wireless technology operating in the 5 GHz spectrum and using multiple input/multiple output technology developed in the wireless industry appears poised to shake up home networking, focused first on enabling high-definition video signals to be shared between PCs and TVs inside the home. The technology could be put in home residential gateways and be part of a broadband service providers' service, or it also could be deployed by consumer electronics companies.

A Cisco-backed Israeli start-up is saying its technology can enable in-home Wi-Fi networks robust enough to deliver multiple HDTV streams. Network technology based on Celeno Communications' semiconductors is now in field trials and will be hitting the market this summer. Celeno manufactures the semiconductors for multimedia Wi-Fi home-networking applications, and it has created technology that upgrades the transmission portion of the Wi-Fi network but will work with existing receivers such as set-top boxes.

Another wireless player, Quantenna Communications, is using 4 × 4 MIMO technology and mesh networking to create its Wi-Fi home network.

“We are taking a two-fold approach,” said Behrooz Rezvani, founder, chairman and CEO of Quantenna. “We can increase the reliability significantly by adding a mesh node on top of the physical layer, so you can work around any difficult spots, work around any configuration, any kind of difficult home or heavy interference in places like East Asia, where you have massive high rises right next to each other. The example I used to give is, if you have a big house, you can't light it with a single light bulb.”

Celeno is expecting commercial deployments as early as this year, while Quantenna is looking more at 2010.

“We are almost to commercial deployment,” said Lior Weiss, vice president of marketing for Celeno. “We did chip-sampling through last summer, moved into product in last October. We have 49 wins in progress. We believe that our partners are going to have their product available in the telco marketplace toward the end of March and April — and one could expect massive field trials first — but by this summer we will see massive deployment.”

Rezvani said Quantenna is sampling its technology to customers for home tests.

“We are sampling to customers, and they are doing the home test with it, and we are obviously fairly new in this, and we are continually getting bombarded with customers,” he said. “But we are seeing customers across the whole gamut: home gateway routers, retail customers, and consumer electronics and TV folks. We think there is going to be a real battle for the home. We are talking to a couple of customers in each of these categories. From the [telecom and cable] operators' perspective, it takes them a little bit longer to roll out the service, but once they get going, it's mass deployment.”