Time to prepare for more cases of electromagnetic hypersensitivity?
How long before some nut crawls out of the woodwork to claim this is giving them bad skin and headaches?
The IEEE has published a 60GHz wireless networking standard, 802.11ad, much to the joy of the WiGig Alliance: its 60GHz "USB/PCI/HDMI/DisplayPort" technology sits on top of the radio-based communications spec. WiGig’s everything-over-the-air system is expected to deliver up to 7Gbit of data per second, albeit only over a …
I'm afraid no. I imagine 60Ghz would only work line of sight and small distance connection, it is yet to be decided what "small distance" means. If we are lucky it might be few meters but I'd be rather less optimistic, at least for first generation hardware.
Still, ability to stream high bandwidth data, using standard protocols, over small distances without necessity for cables is not something to be sneered at.
I could see it have some potential with tablets and cameras, both of which would get an ease-of-use bonus if you could just tell them to beam their video to the TV (both would need to be compliant, but at least there's a target market right there). Could also be a neat trick for future-generation PC video cards to reduce the wire clutter.
For some reason, all this new TV tech makes me thing of Transmetropolitan again because in that comic world, nearly everything connected wirelessly to everything else: piping the phone through your TV and so on.
I seriously doubt your distance would exceed 5 meters at that frequency; unless you were allowed more transmitter power (like maybe a full watt).
What I would suspect that one may experience is intermittent signal loss if a lot of movement occurred in the "line of sight", or so very close to it (causing reflections).
It won't be until kit is actually in the field, will real world, as opposed to lab conditions, define the usefulness of this technology.
I am not holding my breath on this one.
Satellite TV is at 10GHz (3cm wavelength) and many of us will know how the slightest thing in the way (even heavy rain) will cause the signal to drop out. With a wavelength 6 times smaller, I'll certainly be intrigued to see how 60GHz fares.
Not expecting much rain indoors though, to be fair.
Then again, that could be more a matter of signal strength, given that a satellite's beam, having gone a good ways, is bound to be pretty weak coming in, making it more sensitive to interference. 60 GHz may have a smaller wavelength, but it's also a much shorter trip, offsetting. We'll learn more as the kit starts rolling out.