Broadcom CTO on UHDTV and Wi-Fi in everything

1/11/2013 5:01 PM EST

UHDTV will become mainstream even more quickly than HDTV became mainstream.

1/11/2013 5:30 PM EST

Frank, why you say that? At normal viewing distances, unless you have a extremely large TV, you won't be able to see the difference. It'll be years before there's any 4K content.

Already cable companies are overcompressing HD channels to crowd in ever larger numbers of channels, does anyone doubt the same fate would eventually befall 4K?

I think 4K will probably be successful in the same way 3D was, from a sales standpoint only. It'll eventually be bundled with every higher set like 3D, so it'll achieve great market penetration.

But like 3D, only a small number of buyers will make regular use of the 4K capability.

The one thing I do look forward is from 4K is that when it becomes mainstream then monitors with 4K resolution will become mainstream as well. That's somewhere there's an obvious benefit, because I sit maybe 20" away from my 27" monitor, versus 10' from my 50" plasma.

1/11/2013 7:52 PM EST

"At normal viewing distances... you won't be able to see the difference."

There's a simple solution to that: move the couch closer to the television!

My kids always want to sit in the back of a movie theater. I tell them that by doing that we paid $12 to watch it on a big screen. If you sit in the back you might as well be watching the movie on a cell phone.

I like to sit up front. And when you do you can easily see the pixels in the 4k digital movies (it is kind of disappointing really--we need 8K!).

I like full immersion, but we are decades from that, so sitting up close is the best you can get for now.

(Okay, just maybe the fact that I'm a little near sighted might have something to do with wanting to sit up front).

1/14/2013 3:50 PM EST

"unless you have an extremely large TV..." is part of the answer. The other part is, as tb1 says below, the "immersive experience." I expect average screen size as well as resolution to continue to increase, subject to the usual caveats about the economic sweet spots. Not many consumers will pay $20k for a huge UHDTV display, but millions will pay $2K for such a display. The same applies to your comment about bandwidth. As long as there is insatiable demand for more bandwidth, there are profits to be made in finding ways to provide more bandwidth.

It is the nature of our business to make things better & cheaper over time, and the main issue is rarely "if," but rather "when."

1/14/2013 4:52 PM EST

I remember when Kodak first came out with its flat grain Ectar 25 negative film. Even though theoretically "no one" would appreciate the improvement, in 4 X 6 prints, over previous negative films, the improvement was obvious. An image so smooth that you'd swear the film's emulsion was liquid.

Same deal here. People were saying that HDTV was unnecessary. And yet, even on not-so-large screens, it's gorgeous. With UHD, you can get a little closer to your normal size TV set, and still see a beautifully smooth image.

The eye/brain system is complicated. Even if first order approximations imply that "no one" will notice the difference, your brain will inform otherwise. Just look at the way people gush over "retina displays," on very small screens. These have a greater pixel count than 1080p.

What especially appeals to me about UHD is that codec improvements since the introduction of HDTV should make UHD require little or no more channel capacity than HDTV. So it should actually be practical and doable. As opposed to being a bandwidth hog.

1/12/2013 7:03 PM EST

This 5 GHz comment makes me think that perhaps it's not widely known that the 5 GHz band was always part of the 802.11 protocol.

The original 802.11a operated at 54 Mb/s on the 5 GHz band. Then came 802.11b and 802.11g in the 2.4 GHz band. But I'm using 802.11n in the 5 GHz band now. So it's not something new with the 802.11ac standard.

Also:

The main techniques used by 802.11ac, to increase the bit rate beyond 802.11n, are increase the constellation from 64-QAM to 256-QAM, which means more power needed to achieve the same range, and to widen the channel width from 20 or 40 MHz to 80 or 160 MHz.

Which means, the crowding you now see in the WiFi 2.4 GHz band will occur in the WiFi 5 GHz band.

1/12/2013 7:05 PM EST

Forgot a third technique. Increase the propagation paths from the 802.11n 4 X 4 MIMO, to 8 X 8 MIMO.

1/11/2013 6:04 PM EST

Which link has the bigger impact depends on the usage model & behavior of the people in your household. If you've got a large archive of content on a DVR or media server, with multiple people accessing it wirelessly, then upgrading from 802.11n to 802.11ac could be a big improvement at your house.

If on the other hand you've got multiple people streaming content from the cloud, the WAN connection might be the bigger bottleneck.

It's frustrating that in the U.S., the broadband service model is that we pay a lot for a little, compared to some other countries that pay far less for huge (100Mbps) pipes.

1/12/2013 7:46 AM EST

Totally agreed. Media distribution within home will benefit from 801.11ac running on less crowded 5 Ghz.

By in the end, we are charged too much by our service providers in the US!

1/14/2013 10:43 AM EST

You really should wire anything that requires good QoS. I honestly don't see the point of high speed connections inside the home until we have high speed connections to the home.

1/15/2013 4:09 PM EST

Frank, while what you describe is theoretically true, I don't think it's the wave of the future. The idea of people setting up home servers to send around massive files between computers in the home was never a big hit, and is becoming less so.

This kind of file transfer is going to "the cloud," as current lingo calls it. So in fact, your last mile connection is where the action is, rather than the home network. And any IoT appliances in the home, that may actually remain within the home network, are likely to be noise level in terms of bit rate.

As TV migrates to the Internet, this will be even more true. Multiple people watching different TV programs will result in multiple high bit rate streams from "prime time anytime" web servers, through the broadband link, then through the home network, rather than from any sort of centralized in-home PVRs.

1/14/2013 10:39 AM EST

Well, yeah, but no silicon provider can fix "copper in the ground" (or fiber) problems.

4/15/2013 7:43 AM EDT

Of course they do. They won't give us any faster internet until they are ready for it. I'm sure it is already possible to provide much faster connection. But they wait. Who can tell what they are waiting for? As for the standards, they set it, for sure. All together.
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William - http://www.carid.com/