Netgear announces the first products supporting its Beamforming+ technology-- the R3600 802.11ac dual-band gigabit router and the A6200 802.11ac dual-band wifi USB adapter.

Beamforming+ is the Netgear implementation of the Beamforming signal-focusing technology standard. According to the company it improves wifi performance and range by recognising wireless device location(s) before directing wifi signals right at them.

The targeted approach adjusts transmitted signal phase, delivering stable Continue reading...

As customers use more connected devices, home networks must provide steady internet connections, Gartner reports-- providing robust, reliable and fast fixed broadband access.

“Until 3 or 4 years ago consumers primarily accessed the Internet through PCs and laptops but at the beginning of 2013 the picture is very different,” the analyst says. “Consumers use multiple screens to perform various activities that require both fixed and mobile Internet connectivity... Consumers are screen-agnostic-— they will use whichever screen is convenient, as long as it is ‘connected.’”

According to Gartner in 2013 the average home houses 10 "potentially internet-enabled devices" used not only for video sharing and viewing but also home protection, monitoring, security, fitness and health monitoring. The analyst estimates annual WW wifi-only home device (mostly tablets) growth will reach 60 million units until 2016, while global mobile device CAGR (not counting smartphones on a mobile data plan) should total over 8% for the same period.

Why are these guys smiling? You’d smile, too, if you were voted funds on Kickstarter to develop The PanaCast Experience.

Altia Systems is now shipping PanaCast Experience for desktop and mobile device multi-point communications.

PanaCast delivers an immersive, real-time 200° panoramic video experience with up to 60 fps and HD audio to anyone, anywhere, with an internet connection. Even at 3G wireless speeds, PanaCast enables Panoramic-HD video quality and always includes enterprise-level video encryption.

Each remote participant (using the free PanaCast app) can choose their own individual perspective from the stationary camera’s real-time panoramic video stream with the swipe of a finger (or zooming in and out with a finger pinch/spread). Continue reading...

University of Southampton researchers create hollow, air-filled fibre optic cable-- eliminating the latency of standard fibre technology by pushing data at 99.7% of the speed of light.

The hollow optical fibre transfers data at up to 73.7TBps (roughly 10 terabytes per second), some 1000 times faster than current 40-gigabit optic links.

"Light propagates 31% slower in a silica glass fibre than in vacuum, thus compromising latency," the paper, titled "Towards high-capacity fibre optic communication at the speed of light in vacuum," says.

Freescale Semiconductor introduces a tiny chip to address the miniaturisation trend for the Internet of Things (IoT)-- the Kinetis KL02, the smallest ARM-powered microcontroller unit (MCU) in the world.

The KL02 measures all of 1.9 x 2.0mm and still is a full MCU, with 32k of flash memory, 4K RAM, 32-bit 48MHz ARM Cortex-MO+ processor and built-in autonomous peripherals (including a 12-bit analog-to-digital converter and a low-power UART) allowing device makers to build increasingly smaller boards Continue reading...

New wireless solutions were previewed to visitors at ISE in Amsterdam as Peerless-AV announced the formation of the Peerless-AV Technology Division dedicated to advanced digital content delivery solutions for the commercial and residential markets.

The new division will focus on the company’s technology portfolio, to cover new areas such as wireless connectivity, wireless broadcast, digital audio and touch products, to provide a comprehensive catalogue of digital content delivery tools for AV dealers, distributors, integrators and installers.

A selection of these new products was shown by Peerless-AV for the first time in Europe at ISE last week. This included the HD Flow Pro Wireless Multimedia Kit, a device allowing Full HD 1080p video and passive 3D signals to be streamed up to 40m to HDTVs, projectors or other displays without cabling and the PeerAir Wireless HD Multimedia System, an HDMI interface-based plug-and-play wireless content streaming system for home entertainment, corporate, education and training applications. Continue reading...

According to Infonetics Research the global Q3 2012 IP router and switch market "roughly reflects economic conditions," dropping by -5% Y-o-Y to reach around $3.4 billion.

“EMEA posted another negative quarter amid the ongoing fiscal crisis in Europe," the analyst continues. "We may not see much of the usual Q4 budget flush, as it seems just as the European Commission gets closer to economic steadiness, more negative reports arrive.”

Cisco leads the router-only (IP edge and core routers) segment, Continue reading...

After years as a niche technology, 60GHz technology is set to become a mass market solution ABI Research reports-- with annual enabled device shipments to exceed 1 billion units by 2017.

Driving such growth is the linking of the WiGig and Wifi Alliances and the forthcoming ratification of the 802.11ad standard, both advancements encouraging wifi IC vendors to add 11ad to future tri-band solutions (as in 11n/11ac/11ad).

Many describe 802.11ad as the next step for wifi, after 11ac.

Vendor partnerships Continue reading...