I was once told by some technicians at Atlantic Canada phone company Aliant that to get television signal over DSL, you needed about 6 megabits-per-second of bandwidth. At the time of this conversation, Aliant was testing out its Vibe home Internet service in some parts of Moncton, New Brunswick, which was pushing 30 megabits-per-second (Mbps) to selected homes.
Vibe was subsequently discontinued which I thought was a shame but I digress …
I thought of that 30 Mbps service and the fact that you need bandwidth headroom of about 6 Mbps for TV when Reuters moved the following item. It seems the world is about to get 802.11n, which will offer peak wireless bandwidth of better than a half-a-gigabyte second. I thought 802.11g, which maxes out over 50-megabytes-second would be plenty. But half-a-gigabyte? How would we fill up such a big pipe? Wow.
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – A group of technology companies including Texas Instruments Inc. , STMicroelectronics and Broadcom Corp. , on Thursday said they will propose a new wireless networking standard up to 10 times the speed of the current generation. [Reuters: Technology]