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Cebit: Come back infra-red, all is forgiven.
Infra-red data links (as opposed to IR remote controls) were for years the wallflower at the communications ball. PCW long bemoaned the fact that notebooks had an IR port as standard, but PCs didn’t, so the IR had nothing to talk to. You could buy an IR dongle but these cost well over £100, despite the fact that the bill of materials was about tuppence-ha’penny.
IR never really lived down the bad reputation it got from poor early implementations. Wi-fi threatened to kill it off altogether, and emerging ultrawideband radio is being touted for high-speed peripheral device links of the kind Sharp's new Blu-ray player is using IR for.
It has obvious disadvantages, not least that you have only to stand in from of a link to break it, as Sharp’s manager of product planning pointed out at Cebit today. But I have long thought IR is overdue for a comeback – or perhaps I should say free-air optical links, which have the potential to transmit gigabits.
IrSS has a theoretical data rate of 16Mbits/sec, which is lower than rival wireless technologies. But its advantages should not be overlooked.
IR is secure: you cannot easily eavesdrop a tightly focused optical link. It is clean: no radio pollution raising the noise floor and or interfering with neighbouring networks. And it saves a lot of complicated negotiating and addressing – you simply point at what you want to talk to.
Think of all the negotiating Bluetooth would have to go through to pinpoint one machine out of a crowded room to talk to. Think of what humans do: we get up close and point ourselves. This is exactly what you have to do with IR.
So what if someone moves across the path? You ask them to move out of the way, just as you would do if someone is standing in front of the television. Wifi traffic gets blocked and unblocked all the time; we just don’t notice because the obstacle is not physical.
Sharp seemed doubtful today whether the IrSS link would migrate to Europe in actual products - those on show at Cebit are not always exactly the same as those that hit the shop shelves. But I suspect that as radio pollution becomes more of an issue,which it surely will as wireless links scale up, minds will start to turn again to free-air optics.
Posted by Clive Akass on March 14, 2007 | Permalink
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