Fearless forecast: Best and worst of times for wireless

On the positive side, everything seems to be going wireless.

• On the factory floor, ZigBee and competing protocols seem to be making headway at last.
• In the home and office, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Wireless UWB, and ZigBee aim to unplug just about everything.
• In the wide open spaces, cellular, WiMAX and Wi-Fi all have ambitious "coexistence" plans followed by market dominance plans.

There has to be a downside to all this uncontrolled activity and presumed acceptance of wireless as the communications technology of choice. But the list of negatives has to be qualified by the question For whom?

• For consumers, the number of choices will begin to become staggering. Things that are supposed interoperate won't. Things that are supposed to be more convenient will be less.
• For small and even medium sized business, 2007 will be the year when they place their bets (i.e. bet their companies) on a technology and hope it rises to dominance in its niche. WiMAX is probably the best example here.
• For the folks participating standards-making committees, 2007 will be a year of unremitting travel: Hours and hours in security lines at airports and innumerable bottles of fluids confiscated.
• For design engineers, multimode will be the call to arms. Trying to design as many as seven radios into a space the size of a matchbox will become an unending agony—very often followed by product release ecstasy. But then that is what design engineering is all about, isn't it?

Technologies to watch
While there are certainly going to be advances in wireless technologies such as Wi-Fi as the IEEE 802.11n standards nears completion, let's take a look at technologies that might be regarded by some as "sleepers" but have the potential to be blockbusters in 2007.

Software-Defined Radio (SDR)
I'm putting SDR at the top of my watchable technology list because technology is still mostly what it is, as opposed to a fully productized, standardized entity, which we also tend to call—incorrectly—a technology.

Multimode is the reason that SDR has a future. Or, as a design engineer might say, "So many radios and so little space on the motherboard." The future may not be as bring as some suppose, however, because sometimes those Bluetooth, cellular and Wi-Fi radios all want to operate at the same time. Not an unsolvable problem for SDR but a very complicated one.

For more about SDR, check out the SDR Forum's web site at www.sdrforum.org.

RFID
At the other end of the productization spectrum (no pun intended) from SDR is RFID (RF Identification). By that I mean simply that instead of being a nascent technology like SDR, RFID is a very mature technology that has proven itself in many applications already.

The reason that RFID will be big in 2007 can be summed up in two seemingly unrelated words: Wal-Mart and medicine. Together, they add up to a sharp spike in product deployments and opportunities for smart design engineers to invent application-specific hardware and software.

Regarding Wal-Mart and medicine: To be brief, Wal-Mart is adopting RFID and showing unbelievably good returns on its technology investment. Where Wal-Mart goes, other retailers must follow.

On the medication front, look for initial rollouts of RFID systems that can track prescriptions from the factory to the consumer's medicine cabinet. I will leave it to you to figure out how many prescription bottles that is.

More information about RFID is available at AIM Global, an RFID industry association.

UWB and Bluetooth
It is no secret that Bluetooth's data rates leave much to be desired in a wireless world that is getting quite used to 25 Mbit/s and up. But UWB has data rate coming out its ears so this year's announcement that Bluetooth would hook up with the WiMedia Alliance for Bluetooth V3 was good news.

There were always questions about how well the Bluetooth SIG's technology roadmap might work out. Would, for example, the WiMedia Alliance simply come up with a Bluetooth replacement of its own? The answer more and more seems to be: "No, why bother reinventing the significant amount of Bluetooth technology that has nothing to do with data rates or radios."

Tune it at the January 2007 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) to see what I mean.

More information on Wireless USB is available at WiMedia Alliance. More information on Bluetooth is available at Bluetooth SIG.

Mobile TV
We've had trials already and 2007 will be another proof-of-concept year for mobile TV. But we will also see some interesting developments in terms of standards adoption. And therein lies the fate of several companies.

Nokia and Qualcomm are facing off in Europe, respectively backing DVB-H and MediaFLO, a proprietary Qualcomm technology. See my blog on the subject, Battle of the Titans. Given the rancorous recent history of the two companies, there is unlikely to be a compromise.

But mobile TV is a multifaceted technology. As a broadband technology, it has to coexist on the same handset with 3G cellular and it is probably going to have a big impact on the direction and scope on the roadmap for 4G cellular.

In addition, a whole new category of mobile devices will appear because no one really wants to watch TV on a small screen, right? Yes, except if the content is specifically designed for small screens. And that's another factor that complicates the technology deployment.

So all in all, it seems like 2007 will be a wild and wooly year for wireless. We could call it www but that acronym has already been spoken for.