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Wireless at Firewire Speeds?
MeCoward writes "EETimes reporting on working group that hopes to leapfrog 802.11 to create wireless 1394 links.
Initially 100mbps but aiming for 400mbps." I don't expect to see this anytime soon, but it certainly makes things like wireless HDTV feasible. Sure would be cool. Of course Bluetooth is only now just catching on, so imagine how long it'll be before this becomes practical.
I don't expect to see this anytime soon, but it certainly makes things like wireless HDTV feasible.
Uh... maybe I'm just a dumbass or something, but wireless HDTV is already feasible. I watch it every day. It's called 8VSB.
However you encode it, broadcast HDTV is only 19.3 Mbps. It's feasible over dual-like 802.11a, or 802.11g.
but it certainly makes things like wireless HDTV feasible
:P
Because right now you can't pick up HDTV from over-the-air signals... right????
If 802.11g didn't make you want to stick your head in front of a Cantenna to get a preview of brain tumors to come, this new standard certainly will.
UWB only works if you severly limit the range (10m in the case of 802.15.3 networks). This might be fine for connecting you DVR to your TV, but it won't be usefull for connecting your DVR to the tv on the other side of the house or up a floor. This could be ultra cool for next generation MIDI though, the ability to connect all of your devices wirelessly and get both MIDI data and samples would rock. I can't imagine how much this would please all of the musicians who have had to do a road show with the spagheti nest that is MIDI setups.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Heberling is also working with the 802.15.3a committee attempting to set standards for an ultrawideband physical layer chip that could transmit at data rates of 100 Mbits/second initially but be upgraded to versions at 200 and 400 Mbits/s, albeit at ranges of 10 meters or less.
So... I can have a massive bandwidth without any cabling - as long as I don't move the devices further apart than a cable can reach. Somehow, while fiddling with cables can be a hazzle now and then, I think I'll stick to cables. One reason for this is security - unless this technology relies on LOS (line Of Sight), which would make it even less an atractive replacement for cabling, people would likely be able to pick up the signals from a much further distance than the aforementioned ten meters...
...unless I decide to utilise some of that bandwidth - along with CPU-time - to encrypt my signal... which I wouldn't have that much reason to do with a piece of cabel in the first place.
Still, early days and all that - we'll see just where and how this ends up in a few years time.
Everything in the world is controlled by a small, evil group to which, unfortunately, no one you know belongs.
Anyway, this seems to be the next step up from Bluetooth (which is more of a wireless replacement of USB) for connecting wireless DVD players to a projector or TV, or play media files from a wireless 1394 hard drive or a computer sitting in your AV rack.
I agree that IEEE1394 technology could leverage off the existing WAP source focus point which translates into high-end yields in the fluctuation array.
The transfer speeds could be augmented if we daisy-chained several EISA drives in a RAID 4 architecture (reflecting-mirror, where bit orders are reversed in drives 3, 7, and 11). That would allow the drives to sustain the increased write rates, although read rates may suffer during off-hours.
This would also compensate for the electro-synergetic interference that the 2.4GHz encryption spectrum introduces at lower altitudes.
What do you think?
Wearing pants should always be optional.
To think, wireless HDTV! That would be like - like getting HDTV over the air! You would just need an antenna, maybe a fancy converter box. Who could think it possible? Wouldn't it be cool if they could do multiple channels at the same time? *sigh* Jeff
Not really.. firewire is still the way to get digital video off highend digital video cameras into editing systems and back again. Make this wireless would be even more valuable to those who wish to record multiple feeds at the same time off these types of cameras directly into an editing system.
"Bluetooth is only now just catching on, so imagine how long it'll be before this becomes practical. "
Bluetooth is slow. If it was 100 time faster, it would catch on faster, becuase there would be more applications for it. With less-than-megabit speeds, the only thing you would EVER want to do is serial I/O (sync stuff, keyboards), and *maybe* a mono audio stream.
The consumer electronics industry has been eyeballing FireWire (1394) for a while. It makes for one hell of an universal interconnect between all your digital devices, rather than having coax spaghetti and 20 IR or IF devices all over the place. Instead you have one FireWire hub, going to your receiver, your DVD player, your VCR, your CD changer, and your HDTV decoder, and one remote that tells one device what to tell the others...
That's my kind of home automation and control.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Will this new wireless firewire standard still suffer from the same driver patent issues that surround current firewire implementations? I can only assume so if it's based off the same basic technology. It would be nice if they (IEEE) would clean up their act in regards to royalty-based patents finding their way into standards. IMHO, of course.
-A.M.
Pimpin' all the Karma Hoes!
Apple posted a job for a wireless/firewire developer almost a year and a half ago.
"If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?" - Albert Einstein
'Fess up? Who's the idiot that created the name HiperLAN 2? Next thing you know someone will start to write ciberkinetics and giroscopes !
indeed, bluetooth is the betamax of wireless protocols, though you left out one big remaining bluetooth application: headsets.
There's also the nice market of serial and parallel cable replacements, where Bluetooth is almost ideally suited, but I don't think that's going to set the world on fire.
Firewireless has been around a while. It even has DRM.
I don't expect to see this anytime soon...
Why would you? We've only been waiting several years already.
So much for being an 'early adopter'.
Wow, if they had wireless HDTV, they could put that in the UHF spectrum and free up the VHF spectrum for other uses!
FireWire as an electrical interconnect is good. FireWire as a protocol sucks.
Down at the bottom, FireWire is a LAN. You send packets with a source address and a destination address. It's a TDMA LAN, more like token ring than Ethernet, with assigned time slots.
Video is sent as broadcast packets, on a rigid schedule, with no ACKs. That's quite straightforward.
The ugly part is the layer which implements load/store emulation for 32-bit data items in a 64-bit address space. This was designed by people who think in terms of "device registers". Control functions are exercised by stores and loads from "device registers". Typically, these "registers" have no physical existence at either end; one end has a CPU issuing commands and the other end receives commands and executes switch statements. Register definitions are supposed to be standardized; in practice, the standards are more ambiguous than they should be. This results in FireWire devices coming with unnecessary "drivers". A command/response protocol like SCSI would have been far better. With the current system, generic drivers are hard.
There's already Ethernet on top of FireWire, SCSI on top of FireWire, and raw IP on top of FireWire. This is too much layering of pure packet protocols.
if yes, then it is a crime and must be banned!
While firewire has many advantages over USB, I think it's safe to say that after the Ipod got usb 2, firewire is not really doing very well:
Firewire advantages:
* can connect devices directly to each other (no host needed) - possibly with USB on the go
* More power available to devices - true, but most devices don't need all that power.
* faster transfer - this is mostly due to the fact that more of the protocol is done in the chipset, less cpu work, as cpu's get faster this problem will diminish, and most devices don't use all that bandwidth anyway
USB 1/2
* much cheaper to manufacture
* tons of devices - except video cameras, however I believe cameras will switch from dv to hd, and when and if that happens, usb will be used.
* simpler protocol
* much greater support - OpenBSD supports it (extremely important)
Also the completely lunatic idea to have a different port for fw800, is to me unbelievable!
"Of course Bluetooth is only now just catching on, so imagine how long it'll be before this becomes practical."
Bluetooth "caught on" in Europe quite a while back. It's just us backwards Americans that are just now figuring out Bluetooth and GSM (and I don't think we'll EVER move metric..)
I'm pretty certain that these office halogen lights are killing me, so why should I be concerned about this product which promises me precious, precious bandwidth?
Perhaps is was a similar lack of investigation that led to the downfall of the Smell-o-vision?
Does it really seem healthy to be constantly bombarded with gigabits of data?
Any tinfoil hat people out there that do tailoring? -n
http://www.remix.net/
If you were to look at all the RF sources going through the air at any one time, including radio/tv station towers and all of the wide-spectrum junk from that massive nuclear explosion that keeps us warm 93 million miles away, then you should already be paranoid.
Unlicensed transmission devices are already limited to 100mW ERP transmit power. Most modern cell phones are under 600mW maximum IIRC. We probably would have seen much worse already had this been a major problem. What about cordless phones? What about the CRTs, even the low-radiation kind? Those make me more nervous than a simple radio device because we are more frequently and directly exposed to their radiation than a transmitter on a device connected to electronic equipment.
A few years ago, the IEEE Spectrum had an article that addressed the problems of RF from sources like power lines. One of the most interesting conclusions: the radiation along the center axis through an earphone was actually a significant source of radiation to the brain. Does that mean we ban earphones?
Sure, we need to do studies, but I'm suspecting that we won't have to wear tin foil on our heads any time soon, if for no other reason than that we should've already been wearing them a long time ago.
I was worried I would have to wait years for WiFi and cell phones to give me brain cancer.
This should move up my timetable considerably AND increase the number of locations in my home I can place the HDTV that I cannot yet afford. Bonus!
Back in high school I did some student co-op work at Sandia National Labs in Albuquerque. They had (among other cool things) a giant concrete tower used for solar collection testing. A wide array of mirrors on the ground focused sunlight up to the top of the tower, heating the salty water circulating inside.
The cool thing was the actual spot where all the mirrors focused. It glowed, shimmered, and attracted small birds. As the birds flew into the beam... !POOF! A few stray, charred feathers were all that remained.
As the power of all these wireless and cellular technologies increases, I feel more and more like that bird. I can't resist the draw of these bright, shiny objects, but one of these days I'm going to step between two 802.something access points and get zapped into ash.
It's called evolution. If humans are ever going to colonize the universe, we HAVE to develop a tolerance to radiation. What better way than what we've been doing?
Those who can tolerate mutations caused by cellphone and UWB radiation will give rise to children that can tolerate even greater levels. We've removed one selection pressure (hunger and predators) and replaced it with others (recycled and processed foods, constant radiation bombardment).
I see this is a good thing. If it means my granchildren's kids can walk around on Mars in a t-shirt with a SCBA pack, I'm all for it.
>One of the basic consequences of Shannon's Law, a fundamental tenet of information theory, that in order to increase your bandwidth and transmission rate, with a given noise level (which we can't reduce beyond a certain point, due to inherent cosmic background noise, not to mention many other manmade factors), you have to increase your transmission power to compensate.
;-)
Yes, but we're not even close to shannon's law yet.
Remember modems? Those never increased power to get more bandwidth. You could say 802.11 b is the 2400 baud of modems. 802.11 g the 4800 baud strange modem that never seemed to really exist, and this will be the 9600 baud of modems.
We still have a _long_ way to go...
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
Bluetooth chipsets are currently not stable enough to guarantee sub 20ms delivery consistently. A jitter or latency that bad kind of sucks for interactive use, esp. for playing music.
Moreover, the presence of other bluetooth or 802.11 devices could mess it up. As they become more commonplace, you have to consider whether you want to add latency sensitive devices to the mix until QoS is part of the protocol (or at least enforced in the driver).
Black holes are where the Matrix raised SIGFPE
other than for laptops, at our company, (a small consulting firm, that helps other small buisnesses with their computing needs) we have found wireless to be awaste of money. issues with configurations, signal strength, security conserns, costs and lack of speed keeps everyone away. Our personal view is until can get gigabit wireless for the same price as wired, then wireless is mostly a gadget, reserved for the gotta have it croud, before you flame me for saying that, think about it. in a buisness environment, where everyone is tethered to a desk, wireless is worthless.
Everybody denies I am a genius--but nobody ever called me one!
Christ almighty. Say a bunch of stuff we already know, claim you're the head of Nintendo, and get modded up.
Please check the history before modding up, especially if you don't know what the fuck he's talking about.
SAMIR IS A TROLL.
YHL HAND
Oh, and ignore the fact that we contribute very little energy above and beyond THE SUN in higher energy bands, where you should be worried about your health.
BTW the total emf measured in free space near metropolitan areas is less than 1 mG, well below the accepted safe limit. In our datacenter, next to a PDU, it was 3 mG. It had a remarkably high proportion of energy at 60Hz, which caused monitors to wiggle, which is why we investigated. So to compensate we set all monitors at 60Hz.
Not in any way remarkable. You can get a higher exposure by sitting your ass on a copy machine. Got cancer yet, slashdot?
Black holes are where the Matrix raised SIGFPE
Well, it's based on Firewire, but there's no wire... It travels through the air with no wire, kinda like a bird.
I've got it, let's call it "FireBird"... I can't forsee any problems with using that name, and I've done months of research...
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
This will obviously be marketed by Apple as 'firewireless,' or maybe just 'fireless' until the mainstream public/press catches on, when the same wizards who brought you 'wireless fidelity' will start touting the cool features of 'fi-fi.'
Shoot me now.
never underestimate the powers of condescension - it knows not the bounds of time or space
Point to the definitive study and statistical analysis that says the incandescent bulb is safe. Can't find it... well damn I'm going to change all my bulbs to fluorescent... oh wait, has anyone proven that safe yet... I guess it's sunlight for me... wait, doesn't sunlight cause skin cancer...
That said, yes, this new wireless Firewire (Firewireless?) could handle HDTV signals with minimal compression.
1024*768*32*75=1887436800
In other words, we need at least 1.75Gbps before I can play battlefield or raven shield with decent settings on a remote monitor. To play it at a better res (1600x1200), we'd need over twice that (4.29Gbps). Add the keyboard, mouse, etc. to the same link, and a few hundred Mbps for inter-computer communications, and I'd say that 5Gbps would be a good figure to look for before we can finally have completely wireless PCs.
Well, except the power cords... How are we coming on microwave power transmission? Anything anywhere near safe for use close enough to the family jewels to put it under the desk? (Jokes about geeks not needing those aside...)
Ever heard of 802.16? Seriously, the microwave folks have been doing point to point wireless to project mad bandwidth across serious distances for a LONG time.
http://tinyurl.com/4ny52
I am a member of the IEEE Standards Association, and I've spent the last month writing a paper on WLANs.
1)802.15.3 IS Ultra WideBand.
2)The FCC has basically crippled the original version of this tech.
3)Cellular providers & GPS want their freqs eliminated from this (UWB goes from 3-10 GHz)
4)The original spec only went to 100 Mbps, and there is no official working group trying to expand this.
5)The outermost range is 10 meters, while 802.11 can max out at 100 meters. Great leapfrog action!
6)Only 4 companies can currently produce UWB devices- 3 for imaging systems and 1 for some kind of "toilet device". (seriously! but I couldn't find any more enough about this toilet thing)
7)Thomson's 802.11a & HiperLan product has nothing to do with UWB, yet they quote 802.15.3 (see #1)
8)TOTAL HORSESHIT STORY
Happy day!
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
Thanks for your input.
Physics 101: no theory can ever be proved correct, they can only be disproved.
The reason I am concerned about EM radiation is:
1) When ever I talk on my Nokia 3310 I get an instantaneous head ache.
2) The things that you can't see are often the most dangerous.
Sunlight is natural (and quite unavoidable). The incidence of skin cancer has increased with man's activity depleting the ozone layer (I should know - I live in Australia).
I worry about wireless transmissions because there is substantial energy in those EM waves. Being in an enclosed building, surrounded by wireless radio waves transmitted every second may not be safe.
How many people would live next to a TV/radio station transmitter that services a large area? How many people would prefer not to live under high voltage power lines (the type that can light a fluorescent tube at night by holding it up)?
All I'm saying is if it can be done with wires, that's the way I am going to do it.
Evolution you say? I'm thinking more in the direction of a Darwin Award for you!
"Of course Bluetooth is only now just catching on, so imagine how long it'll be before this becomes practical."
:)
There is a big factor in the adoption of Bluetooth:
No one wanted it.
I'm definitely going to buy it when it comes. Now I can hold LAN's between my friends without a high ping.
However, I think some ISP's with game servers would want to have a good hard look at this technology. It could help keep the bandwith choke down in metro areas
Ok, first problem. Yes, iPod supports USB 2.0. It also supports FireWire 1394. When 1394b comes out, Apple will support that. Apple's goal is to sell you an iPod whether you want to use USB, FireWire, swizzle stick, or anything else.
Nobody but the engineers and management of Sony, Cannon, Panasonic, and JVC know if the digital video market will migrate from dv. I doubt it, but my opinion and i'm a nobody.
Most devices don't need the power of FireWire? Personally, every device I've worked with will gobble as much power they can get if they can get it externally.
OK, I could be wrong on this but didn't FireWire get accepted as the standard to connect digital TV? Haven't followed this for a bit. But the FCC was leaning towards FireWire despite Microsoft's and Intel's begging them to accept USB 2. Why? FireWire 2.
When you talk about FireWire vs. USB 2.0, remember that FireWire 2 (1394b or Gigabit 1394) is rolling out. Makes USB 2.0 look slow just as 1394 made USB 1.0 look slow as frozen syrup.
Doing a static analysis of a dynamic world always a bit troubling unless the time difference (seconds, minutes, days) is immaterial. When not (months, years, etc.), the linearization gets shot to hell and your analysis falls apart.
The FireWire vs. USB battle isn't over. In fact, it's just begun because USB couldn't compete with FireWire a year or so ago. Once FireWire 2 rolls out, then we'll see if Intel's gambit to compete with FireWire will work out for them.
Let us go to the stars, dream new dreams, and renew the embers of hope that have long since grown cold.
i guess i have microwaves absorbing into my flesh at this very moment, and 100Mbps is very fast for wireless.
I know you are psychotic, but please make an effort.
Instantly "Firewireless" popped into my mind, but that just doesn't have the same ring to it...
And where the hell has the "Post Anonymously" box gone?!
mbps? Like 1 x 10^-3 bps? Thats some slow-assed connection.
-Splat
I thought we were already pretty damn close to the shannon bound. I believe the paper you want is:
Claude Berrou, Alain Glavieux, and Punya Thitimajshima, "Near Shannon Limit Error-Correcting Coding and Decoding:Turbo-Codes", ICC'93, page 1064-1070, May 1993.
From what i recall, turbo codes let us get as close as we'd need to the shannon bound. Now the only way to get more data in a given bandwidth is to reduce noise (which will probably come in time as uwaves get better and people get more modern dect phone handsets..)
While I have no doubts that you do indeed get a headache when you use your cell phone, I have friends who say the same thing, the power output is very low from those devices and is simply insufficient to cause any damage. Concern about cell phones today simply isn't warranted.
The transmitted power of old AMPS cell phones was much higher than todays digital phones... they needed the margin, but study after study has failed to show any real correlation with any type of illness. If there were a proposed mechanism whereby the RF engergy from a wireless device could induce your headache or other illnesses, I'd be a little less skeptical, but couple the lack of any realistic mechanism with the fact that large scale statistical investigations have failed to show any correlation with illness, and I'll just keep on using my cell phone.
Also, let's not forget that your entire environment is saturated with RF. Television, radio, telecommunications, lightning, etc., all of these generate radio waves that have been passing through you since the day you were born, and at times, at levels far in excess of the transmitted power of any of the wireless devices we are discussing. You talk about living near a TV/radio transmitter. Years ago (years ago in the US at least, Mexico still allows it) radio stations blasted out signals at ridiculous powers. Powers so great, that you could hear the AM signal just by walking by a chain link fence. There are no cancer clusters associated with these transmissions, no increases in migraines.
When RADAR was in its infancy, people were regularly exposed to excessive levels of RF radiation. A famous story involves a set of British researchers trying to find the source of a humming sound coming from their RADAR assembly only to discover that the sound wouldn't register on any microphones. It turned out that it was a side effect of the RADAR. The energy was so great that it caused the membrane around their brains to expand and contract thereby causing them each to hear a sound as the beam swept through them. They suffered no long term effects, and no headaches, even as they heard the sound.
RF can injure or kill (just think about a microwave oven) but the fact is that the devices we are talking about (cell phones, 802.11, the new Firewireless) do not even aproach the level necessary for injury. Maybe, like the sound that the British researches were searching for, it's all in your head.
The basic problem with USB(1/2) is that it utilizes CPU power to do the transfers (what else would you expect from Intel).
Thus, in small devices, a huge battery power is drained when doing these transfers, not to speak, a lot of CPU power is required.
Firewire is nice to CPU. It can use DMA to do all the transfers without occupying the CPU. Thus you can play DVDs at the same time as you're streaming through your firewire LAN. With USB2, the CPU is engrossed with moving the 60 MByte/s of data to/from the device... something much cheaper DMA chips were invented for.
So while USB is good and all... I still favour 1394 for its elegance and doing things *right*.
- mritunjai
From what I understand of it... the FCC is leaning towards firewire (1394 a and b) because of an encryption scheme called 5C.
So 802.11 is at 54mb, and they want to "leapfrog" it by going to 100 sometime, and 400 sometime later.
Since 54mb devices are already common and faster 802.11 will undoubtedly follow, how do they plan to "leapfrog" it?
Donate background CPU time to fight cancer.
In the US, HD DTV terrestrial broadcasts are done with a MPEG-2 transport stream of maximum 19.39 Mbps using the ATSC standard.
In practice, most people will be receiving HD at slightly lower speeds to allow a multiplexed SD feed (2-4 Mbps) in the ATSC channel along with the HD feed (15-17 Mbps)
I am under the impression that most DBS HD will also be in the 10-20 Mbps department. HDNet programming varies from 10 Mbps to 18 Mbps, while DBS HBO HD only goes up to 15 Mbps.
Uncompressed HD is somewhere around 1.485 Gbps. The "standard" for broadcast HD tapes is HDCAM which is at 140 Mbps. Then it gets squished down to below 19.39 Mbps for broadcast. So there is a lot of compression before you get over the air.
Duuhh. Get your head out of the dark hole. FW1 beats usb for throughput. I know, you're going to post 480 vs 400 mbps. Well FW supports, peer to peer, has less overhead and is superior...and, dumbbass, FW 2 (800 mbps) is out NOW. Apple is in the business of selling the damn things, USB 2 is as good as most PCs can handle, why not sell something that takes advantage?
There's always this company's products... (I work for them). There were five different companies demo'ing the chipset sending video at CES this year.
802.11b supports speeds up to 11Mbps, and 802.11a supports up to 54Mbps. Rates of less than 1 bit per second don't sound like much of a "leapfrog over 802.11" to me.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
I have to differ with you, at least based on current technology. 802.11 and Bluetooth are both wonderful technologies, and complement each other well.
For example, my laptop is equipped with both, and I use both on a daily basis. I access 802.11b networks as my primary connectivity means at home and as a secondary option at work.
I use bluetooth to connect the laptop and my cell phone (and my girlfriend's cell phone as well). Being able to synchronize phone books between the two devices is nice, but there are two other uses which people seem to overlook.
1) If you send and receive a lot of text messages via cell phone, the ability to use the full keyboard instead of the phone's keypad is a godsend! I have some friends who are text message nuts, and I love being able to effectively use text messaging like a ubiquitous chat client even while my phone is in the next room.
2) My laptop is an Apple PowerBook, and the Sony-Ericsson Clicker software is a true killer app! It's functionality is limited only by what can be scripted for it (which is damn near anything the computer can do), and I'm able to do things with my phone and computer that are downright sci-fi. For example, I'm listening to music on it right now. If I get up and leave the room it'll pause all on its own, and resume when I come back. I don't have to do a thing- it's completely automatic, and I've gotten so accustomed to it that it seems perfectly natural now. It's an example where the range limitations of Bluetooth are an advantage.
Obviously the shorter range lends itself to greater security as well, which is also a consideration for Bluetooth headsets.
-Cybrex
Boundless Expansion, Self-Transformation, Dynamic Optimism, Intelligent Technology, Spontaneous Order- BEST DO IT SO!
So it doesn't matter whether or not firewire (aka ieee1394) lives or dies in the marketplace. Although, bridging from 802.15.3 to 1394 will be easier if they share a mac layer (and, for example, bridging to usb2.0)
Using the USB protocol might be a better market choice, but this is the IEEE, where leveraging an existing IEEE standard gets the inside track of consideration.
No, Bluetooth is more like the Pinto of wireless networking. It's slow, blows up easily, and comes in your choice of puke green or silver.
Okay, maybe not the last one. :-)
120 character sigs suck. Make it 250.
Bluetooth can't be the BetaMax of wireless protocols. BetaMax was of higher quality than its competition, but failed due to lack of licensing.
Are you trolling? Bluetooth's biggest problem is that Ericsson's licensing policies makes it a pain in the neck, and expensive, to develop with it. Lack of licensing, precisely.
The other problem, that it solves problems (power consumption, authentication by pairing, better use of spectrum) that consumers are less concerned with than "easy-to-use high-speed wireless networking" is also pretty analogous to Betamax: consumers wanted a format that could hold a whole movie and were less concerned with image quality.
That said, I'm not impressed with the quality of current Bluetooth offerings either: a wireless headset shouldn't crash! I've heard similar reports about crashes during Bluetooth syncing of PDAs and mobile telephones, too.
The thing you have to look at is not the cost or the raw bandwidth. But the protocol. Firewire has many andvantages which is why it is used in video cameras.
I highly doubt that High end DV cameras will move to USB. The protocol isn't really designed for that type of application. While a close inspection of the specifications is really beyond the scope of my reply, it is something to look into.
Currently you can get a device that allows you to use any DV camera to go right to a hard drive through 1394.. these also allow playback from the HD to a TV without the camera, or hook the drives right up to a computer for editing.