Oct 25

Wi-Fi Will Help You Cut the Cord — No Router Required

Posted in: Today's Chili, wi-fi, Wireless

Add Wi-Fi to the list of technologies that the electronics industry wants to use to help eliminate cable clutter.

A new standard called Wi-Fi Direct made an important step towards becoming product reality Monday when the Wi-Fi Alliance announced it would begin certifying products that comply with the standard.

The Wi-Fi Alliance is the industry consortium that oversees the family of wireless technology standards known as Wi-Fi.

With Wi-Fi Direct, devices will be able to connect to one another easily for permanent or temporary connections, without requiring them to join the network of a nearby wireless router.

Instead, you’ll just push a button or tap the “OK” button in an on-screen dialog box, and your devices will link up to each other.

Think of it as the wireless alternative to a USB cable. Wi-Fi Direct joins a host of other wireless technologies, such as WiDi, Wireless USB and W-HDI, all aimed at replacing desktop and entertainment-center cables with skeins of wireless data wending their ethereal way through your house.

Wi-Fi Direct connections could be used to show images from your camera on a friend’s HDTV, display PowerPoint slides from your smartphone on a client’s video projector, send web pages from your tablet to a printer, or even stream HD video from your laptop to your TV. A cutesy animation from the Wi-Fi Alliance (above) shows how this could work.

Devices could support any number of connections, limited primarily by the computing power of the devices themselves and their programming.

“Since you’re not going through a router, there’s no single point of constraint,” says Edgar Figueroa, CEO of the Wi-Fi Alliance.

The technology will support bandwidth and ranges comparable to what regular Wi-Fi offers: Figueroa claims about 200 meters of maximum range and about 250-300 megabits/second of real throughput. Of course, in the real world, where walls and electronic interference abound, you’ll probably see somewhat less than that.

It should be enough to support a single HD video stream, however, which would be plenty for most home users. And if someone is simultaneously downloading another HD video stream via your Wi-Fi router, the two streams wouldn’t interfere with each other.

The certification program means that manufacturers can begin building compatible products, then get them tested by the Wi-Fi Alliance so they can slap a “Wi-Fi Direct” logo on their packaging. That process starts with the makers of chipsets and plug-in cards, such as Broadcom, which announced a Wi-Fi Direct-certified card Monday.

Within the “near future,” says Figueroa, such capabilities will trickle down to consumer products that incorporate the chipsets and cards now hitting the market. In practice, it could be months before consumer products are on sale, and it may be a year or more before it’s widespread.

But then the tricky part begins, because not all Wi-Fi Direct devices will be able to connect with one another. Devices will only be able to connect with devices that have compatible Wi-Fi Direct support. For instance, a smartphone might support Wi-Fi Direct printing, but not Wi-Fi Direct for an external display — meaning you wouldn’t be able to connect it with your TV, even if your TV supported the standard.

Explaining all that to non-technical consumers is going to be the industry’s next big wireless challenge.

Wi-Fi® gets personal: Groundbreaking Wi-Fi Direct™ launches today (press release)

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