Wideband: multimedia unplugged

Promising to eliminate just about all of a home´s signal cables, ultrawideband very-low-power wireless technology, when finally standardized, will be a carrier-based system most likely incorporating frequency hopping and orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM). Its purpose: to replace almost every data cable in the home, even the ones going in and out of the television set, a job that requires moving hundreds of megabits of data per second. That´ s faster than all but the speediest of wired networks. The speed is achieved, however, over distances of only 10 meters or so. Ultrawideband (UWB) handles anything from high-speed streams carrying real-time HDTV programs to images downloaded from a digital camera to low-speed timing signals for keeping clocks accurate.