Understanding Bandwidth Wireless Network Technology Future Trend: Stopping for gas on the way home, you notice your iPod has sniffed out the station’s wireless signal. On a whim you decide to download a movie for the night. You browse the movie section of iTunes, make your selection, and some 15 seconds and 5 gigabytes later you’re done – all before the tank is full.

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by Geoff Koch

Millimeter wave technology could finally retire the living room wires

Stopping for gas on the way home, you notice your iPod* has sniffed out the station’s wireless signal. On a whim you decide to download a movie for the night. You browse the movie section of iTunes*, make your selection, and some 15 seconds and 5 gigabytes later you’re done – all before the tank is full.

At least that’s the vision of a modest industry working group hammering out the details of a new wireless technology.

No, the group has no idea whether Wi-Fi on iPods and full-length movies on iTunes will ever come to pass (though the Web and blogosphere are lousy with speculation about both topics.) However, if the loose collection of engineers has their way, lightning fast wireless connectivity will become a concrete reality by decade’s end. “Whole new industries can be developed around this,” said Brian Goucher an IBM hardware engineer working on the standards effort for the new millimeter wave technology, or mmWave for short.

mmWave signals travel at the relatively wide open bands between 30 GHz and 300 GHz, far away from other wireless clutter on the electromagnetic spectrum. Proliferating Wi-Fi hotspots, in contrast, congest frequencies such as 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz, as anyone knows who’s ever opened laptop at the neighborhood coffee joint only to be confronted several available Wi-Fi networks.