Posted on Monday, April 16 2007 @ 20:00 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
At the IDF in Beijing, Intel talked about its upcoming configurable antenna technology. This should arrive by 2009 in notebooks and UMPCs, Bit Tech
reports:
By using a switching technology that quickly alternates the transmission components of the various wireless modules inside the device, it's possible to completely minimise interference between competing components and, at the same time, provide a transparent user experience.
Timing the use of the various radios allows the devices to operate and transmit in bursts in order to not have them both on simultaneously and interfere with each other. High level switching allows each one to talk in due process, but also not miss receiving packets and compromising speed.
The Bluetooth specification includes adaptive hopping to different channels which allows Bluetooth and WiFi to co-exist. However, with more radios and bands these specific pairing solutions get harder to solve and coexistence is more limited.
There's also talk about the 60GHz band becoming available to consumers by 2011 or 2012:
Why is it interesting? Pretty much every world government has an area of around 60GHz left unlicensed. This is a very large bit of unused spectrum that offers significant potential considering how cramped our airwaves already are.
60GHz is extremely high frequency, so building a radio capable is very challenging for silicon. Also, high frequency is very directional rather than omni-directional like standard 2.4GHz WiFi so it should be interesting how this develops, whether we see a personal area network inclusion into clothes or items that you carry around with all the time like mobile phones or keyrings.
