Imagine streaming any movie at high speed, anywhere in your house, to any device wirelessly connected to your network. The technology isn't as far away as you might think. A group working on Gigabit Wi-Fi this week published a new specification to aid with interoperability tests set to begin this fall, trade magazine Network World reports.
Gigabit Wi-Fi -- or WiGig, as some call it -- has game-changing potential in that it promises to deliver data as fast as 7 gigabits per second over a home network. I'm connected directly to my home office router via Ethernet cable, and I still can't get better than 1 Gbps.
But WiGig isn't just about speed. The technology is also being designed to wirelessly connect to HDMI devices to broadcast high definition video. The very idea gives me geekbumps. (As in, getting goosebumps while geeking out over technology.)
Curiously, Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) doesn't have much of a say in how WiGig develops. The Mac maker isn't a member of the Wireless Gigabit Alliance, the trade group that develops guidelines for using WiGig in electronic devices. Board members include Cisco (Nasdaq: CSCO), Intel (Nasdaq: INTC), Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT), and NVIDIA (Nasdaq: NVDA), among others.
Why not Apple, too? I can only imagine what a successful implementation of WiGig might look like in Apple TV. No, I'm not talking about the $99 box. I'm talking about a full-screen high definition Apple television with a WiGig chipset connected to a WiGig Airport router and imbued with a mammoth solid-state drive for hosting key apps such as Netflix (Nasdaq: NFLX) and Hulu Plus. Apple TV as it was meant to be, in other words.
But that's also just my take. Now it's your turn to weigh in. How would you implement WiGig? What innovations would you like to see as an investor? Please weigh in using the comments box below. You can also add any of these stocks to your watchlist to get our latest analysis as it's published:
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