During this past week, I gave a presentation in my Ubiquitous Computing course on the topic of Indoor Communications. The intent was to introduce and describe a number of communication technologies for applications for indoor communications. In my presentation, I touched on a number of communication technologies including Bluetooth, Powerline, and Infrared.
Here is the slides to my powerpoint presentation on February 6th, 2007.
However, it seems to me that none other than 802.11 Local Area Network is the clear winner for indoor communications. In many residential and even some metropolitan areas today, we already detect multiple wireless access points nearby. Furthermore, besides having 802.11 wireless access points in the typical household with multiplePCs and laptops for sharing Internet connection, there are now a number of consumer products that are already or soon-to-be wi-fi enabled (e.g. cell phones, Skype phones, cameras, and digital photo frames) AlthoughWi-Fi is known to have interference issues in the open spectrum, over time I think there will be technological solutions to this problem such as cognitive radios.
The FONera Movement is an interesting business case of using wireless access points as a mechanism to share network connection with every consumer being also a service provider. Currently, the target rate for FON routers is to reach a critical mass of having 1 in 10,000 FON routers to human population per country around the world.
