Know Yer Hardware:
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When Bluetooth was originally conceived back in the late 1990s, it was expected that the most likely use of the technology would be for small peripherals like keyboards and mice as a way to eliminate cable spaghetti on the desktop. But early Bluetooth devices weren’t very good, and so the technology lost out to IR and low-power RF on the desktop. The niche that Bluetooth finally won was the mobile phone headset. But maybe Bluetooth has one more shot at being the preferred protocol for keyboards and mice: chipmaker Broadcom has devised a Bluetooth chipset that uses such little electricity that a keyboard could run on a single pair of AA batteries for 10 years.
The average downstream speed for broadband connections in the United States is a paltry 3.9 Mbps, but earlier this year ARRIS, one of the companies that provides cable modems to the broadband service providers, demonstrated a fiber optic node that was capable of up to 4.5 Gbps throughput. The demo was intended to show off the capacity of the fiber network more than any particular device, but it’s nice to dream of a day when American broadband might not come through a beanblower.
Tangentially related, one of the reasons broadband providers might want to be able to offer all that bandwidth is because of the steady drain of cable television customers to all-online video. Contributing to that process: set-top box maker Boxee is rolling out an HDTV broadcast signal receiver that plugs into their box as a dongle, allowing customers to pick up all their local television station HD signals over the air and view them through the Boxee device. Until the day comes that local stations shrivel up and blow away, having access to them will continue to be a significant plus for cable TV. Frankly, though, this Boxee thing really just makes me all the more curious to see if the rumored Apple Television will really happen.
