Wireless HD

[Tom Snyder]

The topic has been brought up several times... a call from a neighbor promoted me to bring it up again.  With wireless N now available, how/when can we wirelessly transmit an HD signal to our entire house (or even just a single TV)?

I saw the articles on the Belkin Flywire, but that's a $500-600 dollar solution. Anything cheaper on the way that could just use a Linksys N wireless router?

[picopir8]

Depends, do you have a HTPC connected to you HDTV set?  If so you could stream to that using orb or one of the HD slingboxes.

[Tom Snyder]

It's a neighbor who bought a relatively new house with a single cable jack in the living room (on the wrong wall)  and one in the basement. They've gotten bids to cable the entire home, but those are coming in at $800-900.  Even Charter wants to charge them to add cable runs to the various rooms. She emailed me to ask me how close the technology was to having wireless HD so a single cable box can transmit a signal wirelessly to several HD TV's around the house.

[kevbeck122]

The only options I see are:
- Media Center PC with cablecard and media center extenders at each TV.  That'll get pretty pricey; $1,000 to $1,500 is the cheapest you'll find a PC with cablecard plus ~$200-$250 for each extender.  Eventually D* will work with media center PCs when the USB tuner comes out.
- Wireless HDMI
- Wait until products based on the WirelessHD standard come out: http://www.wirelesshd.org/

[picopir8]

If your neighbor live in a uverse area, suggest going with uverse.  They run network cable throughout the house (fishing through walls and using wall plates).  When I signed up the install was $50 but they also sent a $50 visa gift card.  Last I checked they were running a similar deal.

Wost case, if they do not like uverse, they cancel after that and they have a cheap/free network.  If they prefer coax, then they could just tie coax to the network cable and use it to fish the coax through the walls.