Who doesn’t love wireless? http://louiskjksheehan.blogspot.com  Surfing the Web while sipping a latte at your favorite café certainly beats being chained to a modem by a data cable. But for applications that demand a really fast connection, such as watching live high-definition television, today’s WiFi falls short. http://louiskjksheehan.blogspot.com The fastest WiFi available maxes out at 600 million bits per second, fine for watching a clip from YouTube but far from the billions of bits per second that HDTV can require.

The reason for WiFi’s limit is that the equipment it uses typically operates at radio frequencies just above 2.4 gigahertz. All else being equal, there is a direct relationship between the frequency of a wave and the amount of data it can carry: The higher it goes, the more data you can squeeze in. However, the higher the frequency, the more it costs to build the corresponding radio hardware.

IBM is attacking the problem by building a wireless system that operates at 60 gigahertz. To minimize cost, IBM is working to fit the radio equipment onto an integrated circuit that can be made cheaply. The key here is what is called a (brace yourself) heterojunction bipolar transistor. This device can switch on and off more quickly than other transistors, allowing it to manipulate high-frequency radio waves. IBM has demonstrated a setup that can handle the 2 billion bits per second needed to transmit HDTV at a resolution of 1080i. (For digital TV neophytes, 1080i signifies a picture with a resolution of 1,920 by 1,080 pixels.) In a few years a central media player in your home will be able to beam high-definition video to your TV or laptop, eliminating the rat’s nest of cables dangling behind the entertainment center.