When Thinking About Tomorrow...Forget About Today

Today is so yesterday...really. Tomorrow, in fact, might already be yesterday.

If you had your doubts that wireless and mobile devices (among other things) are the future check out the work being done at the Georgia Institute of Technology:

[from electronista] The Georgia Electronic Design Center (GEDC) at the Georgia Institute of Technology has announced a CMOS chip that is capable of transmitting 60GHz RF signals. The technology is claimed to be capable of wireless data-transfer speeds in the multi-gigabit range. Potential applications include high-speed short-range communication between desktop computers, data centers, wireless home audio or video systems, or moving gigabytes of photos and video to and from mobile devices. The single-chip component integrates a low-power radio with an embedded antenna, while drawing only 100 milliwatts of power. GEDC researchers have experimented with a variety of configurations, reaching speeds up to 15 Gbps at one meter, 10 Gbps at two meters, and 5 Gbps at five meters. Tests also successfully streamed uncompressed 720p or 1080i video.

Low power requirements, lightning fast speeds, and if HD video can be streamed there's no audio content it won't be able to handle with ease.

Any plan for tomorrow must factor in and try to anticipate the (completely) unexpected.

I believe conventional wisdom in the radio industry today still believes in-car internet is still a long way off. Don't believe it! We (radio) were slow to recognize and participate in the tech revolution--even though it was already moving at warp speed.

High speed...wireless...cloud computing coming sooner than we all think.

3G Is So Yesterday

Despite the continued iPhone buzz and the fact that 3G is not yet available everywhere...get ready for 4G. It's already here from Sprint in Baltimore in the form of a wireless laptop card. It's safe to assume 4G will begin to appear in other cities in the not to distant future.

After the card purchase the monthly cost is around $30.

The wireless card is surely just the opening act and the precursor for 4G making its way into smaller Blackberry and iPhone type devices--and it won't take long.

What is it capable of? Everything. Even when in a moving vehicle. Only minimal imagination is needed to have a pretty good idea how, yet again, this can and will change everything. As always this represents a great multi-channel content rich opportunity for radio.

Laptop magazine did a full review and is linked below. But check out this tidbit:

Hulu

We tried watching a video on Hulu.com with both mobile broadband services. On Verizon EV-DO, which actually has a policy against using their service to watch video, it took 13 seconds before our video began playing and the video paused twice in the first minute to rebuffer. It would have continued to rebuffer if we kept watching. On XOHM, we saw a little jerkiness but the video started after just 9 seconds and never paused to rebuffer.

Not bad considering the how bandwidth hungry high quality video is!

Laptop Magazine reports on XOHM in Baltimore