Netgear to stream Full HD anywhere in the home over 4x4 MIMO WiFi
By Thomas Ricker 
posted January 5th 2010 6:55AM
posted January 5th 2010 6:55AM
Hey Netgear, did you have a surprise for us at CES? Say the world's first 4x4 MIMO 802.11n WiFi HD Video bridge? Sorry, but Quantenna just revealed your partnership that promises to deliver Full HD video quality streams across distances of "100 feet or more, regardless of signal interferences and dead zones." According to the Quantenna press release, anyway. That's up to 5x the distance of existing wireless HD solutions thanks to Quantenna's 4x4 Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) technology, adaptive transmit digital beamforming, and wireless channel monitoring and optimizing; a lot of scary sounding jargon that should allow the device to carry up to four streams of full HD video pretty much anywhere in the house with claimed "near-perfect transmission performance." While we don't have pics yet you can expect Netgear's baby to be sporting 4 antennas (like the Quantenna reference design pictured) when it's announced proper in the next few days.
Cool!!
@MXY23 Oh, and - CES 2010!!! WAHEY!! :D...
OK - Calmed down now :)
"near perfect"
not good enough. will stick with wires thanks.
Goodbye HDMI. Goodbye DVI. Hello.... wifey? or "wifi" *shrugs* pronounced the same isn't it?
@buoy
nope, it's not.
Nice , still don't trust it , ill stick with MoCA , works perfect 100% of the time
@JTD No kidding - very few people know of MoCA and I used that after I had an extra FIOS router laying around. (BTW, much cheaper to just get a few old fios routers and configure them then to get a $200 kit - old actiontecs are real cheap, like probably < $30) which is 112? 130? ish MBps, which does HD fine. Of course, I have gigabit ethernet now ... :)
"its so powerful, if u stand next to it too long you may develop cancer"
I want one... scratch that, I *need* one!
"100 feet or more, regardless of signal interferences and dead zones."
That sounds like a challenge. Probably a pretty easy one to achieve too.
Digital beamforming?
Netgear: There's something very important I forgot to tell you.
Consumers: What?
N: Don't cross the streams, er, beams ...
C: Why?
N: It would be bad.
C: I'm a little fuzzy on the whole "good/bad" thing here. What do you mean, "bad"?
N: Try to imagine all life as you know it stopping instantaneously and every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light.
Engadget: Total protonic reversal!
C: That's bad. Okay. All right, important safety tip. Thanks, Netgear.
@Langdon Alger
So does this thing summon Gozer?!?!
@Teer1998
No but it just might kill him!
"Regardless of signal interference or dead zones" .. hyperbole much?
I dunno, just sounds like a challenge to me :)
@UnixSystemsEngineer
Indeed, they seem to be defying the laws of physics in that promise.
@UnixSystemsEngineer
I think thats why they used 100 feet as a qualifier. Its not hard to interfere w/ a 5GHz signal and I dont think it will perform well in a large house across a couple floors. We'll see.
I read bluray has a maximum (not always used) bitrate of 54Mbit, so how hard is it really to transmit full HD?
Not that getting 802.11g speeds over 100 feet without issues is so common from the user experiences I hear.
One thought. Since devices like this are going to be extremely expensive, why not 'subsidize' the cost by packing in a nice router along with it?
That way you just have a higher router pricepoint (50 = cheap, 100 = decent, 150 = gaming, 250-300 = gaming + video + audio). That would be a lot more likely to get my networking dollar than a standalone unit, no matter how good it was.
Note that this might be what the device is aiming for, but it seems unclear whether it is using the 802.11n streams for HD only.