INSIDE a disused TV factory in Singapore, an unusual experiment is taking place. While most of the factory stands idle 鈥� production long ago moved to lower-cost facilities in Malaysia 鈥� one corner is a hive of activity. It resembles the interior of a house or apartment and is used to test and demonstrate the technologies that consumer electronics companies hope will one day be ubiquitous.
The mockup is part of a government project to work out how to pipe sound and images from a vast array of electronics devices to every corner of our homes. But there鈥檚 not a cable in sight, because the project uses wireless links to connect the PCs to the hi-fi systems to the video recorder to the televisions and to a broadband internet connection. Using a single 鈥渞emote control鈥� that you can carry with you round the house, you will not only control these systems but also play their sounds and display their images. The dream is to be able to record the latest episode of The Simpsons, while listening to the BBC World Service via a broadband internet connection, all without even getting out of bed. So far, however, the reality is rather different.
Consumer electronics companies have been hooked on the idea of this kind of networking for some time. This year, 17 of them joined forces to form the Digital Home Working Group, with the aim of ensuring that their devices all work together. Singapore hopes to lead the way, and has wired up more than a hundred homes to test ways of connecting these devices reliably, and to study how people use the new kit. Outsiders such as journalists are not allowed in the homes, which is why Philips, the Dutch consumer electronics giant that supplied much of the equipment, has built its mock-up home.
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At the heart of the system is a set of four boxes each the size of a video recorder. One contains a broadband modem that connects to the internet over mains power cables or a phone line. The others house a television tuner, a combined DVD player and recorder, and a control unit.
They are linked wirelessly to a PC in the bedroom, to television sets in various rooms and to the battery-operated remote control 鈥� a device the size of a small laptop computer, with a touch-sensitive colour screen, that can be taken anywhere in the house. As well as controlling all the other bits and pieces, the remote control can play back sound and images streamed from them over the wireless link. 鈥淚nstead of going to where the content is, let the content come to you,鈥� says Bala Balakrishnan, the engineer in charge of the Philips project.
That鈥檚 the theory. But in a demonstration of the exotic broadband link, the Philips devices connected to the internet over power lines refused to talk to devices connected in the same way but made by SP Telecoms, a division of Singapore Power, even though they use the same standards.
The team was able to show how local radio and television broadcasts could be streamed to the remote control. But, when asked, could not do the same with other radio stations, such as those broadcast on the web by the BBC. Singapore is famous for censoring external media, but a local internet cafe carried the BBC, so the problem must lie elsewhere 鈥� though exactly where was never explained.
Other problems were evident. What gives wireless networking its huge potential is a series of standards known collectively as Wi-Fi. In theory even the most basic of these, called 802.11b, can carry up to 11 megabits per second (Mbps), which ought to be more than enough to support the 5 Mbps needed for DVD-quality images. But in practice the error-correcting code required to ensure clear images cuts its capacity to less than 5 Mbps, making it unusable.
The engineers in Singapore have tested the newer 802.11a standard, which can deliver 30 Mbps, but it turns out to be too weak to carry signals through walls. They may fare better with the latest standard, 802.11g, but is still in development. One known problem with 802.11g is that nearby networks can interfere with each other, and microwave ovens can intrude too.
As a stopgap, the team was forced to use old video senders, which transmit analogue signals at VHS rather than DVD quality. Philips and its partners are banking on wireless networking, and are working hard to iron out the problems. But for the moment, demonstrations like this serve only to show that the current technology is not up to the job.
A history of hiccups
The story of attempts to connect consumer electronic devices via wireless links is littered with disappointments. At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in 2001, a consortium of companies called the Home Audio Video Interoperability group demonstrated its system to an eager crowd of engineers and journalists. It was supposed to link a computer, recorder and tuner, but to everyone鈥檚 embarrassment, instead of video pictures it showed a series of error messages punctuated by reboots and blue barometer progress bars.
Since then things have got better, but not much. At the IFA consumer electronics show in Berlin this August, the Japanese company Sharp demonstrated how it could connect a television tuner to a portable LCD screen using Wi-Fi. One short demonstration was impressive. But Sharp was not taking any chances with the Wi-Fi links during the rest of the show because of the potential interference from nearby Wi-Fi networks. Anyone taking a close look would have seen that the screens were connected to their tuners by a short length of good old-fashioned wire.
