The Current State of Wireless HD Signals

The progress of technology is a fantastic thing, and I don’t think many will disagree to that (well, unless you happen to have a forced RFID chip implanted somewhere on your body), but to me, one of the best innovations has been wireless technology. Everything from wireless Internet to wireless keyboards, I love it. To sit at a desk and not kick around cables under your desk… it’s a great feeling. So, wouldn’t it be nice if everything was wireless?

As years pass, wireless technology will continue to improve, and we’ll no doubt be seeing a lot more of its usage in the years to come. In the future, we may even have wireless power, and since we saw a brief demonstration of just that last year at IDF, it’s definitely a possibility. But, one thing’s for sure, and that’s that if there’s one crowd who would appreciate cutting the cords the most, it would be the home theater crowd.

Where we stand currently in wireless HD video/audio is a little complicated, and there doesn’t seem to exist extremely stable solutions right now – at least, none that are too affordable. Ars Technica attempts to take the confusion out of the technology as a whole though, by taking a look at three companies who each promise to have the best solution available, and seeing that we’ll be hearing a lot more from each of them during 2009, there’s no better time than now to see what each one offers.

While cable costs do drop over time for most electronic hookups (like Ethernet, USB, and so on), the downward curve is likely to be slow for longer HDMI runs. Wireless technologies, in contrast, often see plummeting cost when they start being built in large numbers and integrated directly into existing electronics, in this case television sets and set-top boxes.