December 1, 2000

Home stream home
Wireless LANs give multimedia special attention

Now that the ability to network one's home with wireless technology is becoming a reality, a logical next step would be serving video and audio to untethered home devices.

ShareWave is one of the first out of the gate with semiconductor technology to support such multimedia-capable wireless home networks. ShareWave's technology enables the transmission of high-fidelity multimedia (such as MPEG-2 video and MP3 and CD quality audio) over wireless LANs.

NETGEAR recently announced that its suite of 11-Mbit/sec wireless home-networking devices will implement ShareWave's technology. NETGEAR's first product, the Wireless11X WA301 PCI Adapter, incorporates ShareWave's Series 2000 family of wireless network controllers and Whitecap network protocol. Whitecap addresses home-networking requirements for multimedia support, ease-of-use, and reliability, with such features as forward error correction, channel agility, master redundancy, and open enrollment. ShareWave is developing Whitecap with a forward interoperability path to any streaming technology endorsed by the 802.11-based WECA (Wireless Ethernet Compatibility Alliance).

—Margot Suydam