Celeno has partnered with Edimax on a video bridge that supports 802.11ac and boasts a peak radio throughput of 866 Mbps.
The video bridge is capable of provisioning uninterrupted streaming of HD IPTV, as well as data streams to multiple screens within a user’s home, while also ensuring quality of service (QoS) and quality of experience (QoE).
Lior Weiss, Celeno’s vice president of marketing, said the video bridge has two primary use cases for video service providers. The first is providing dedicated home networking for IPTV streaming between a broadband gateway and an IP set-top box. The video bridge – Weiss said a similar device was used on AT&T’s U-verse service – supports up to eight HD streams and includes whole-home DVR use cases.
The second use case is enabling an 802.11ac access point that externally connects to a legacy home gateway or router to enhance home coverage, with 5 GHz high throughput capabilities to stream HD video and provide Internet access to second screen devices in the home.
“While the 802.11ac standard was created for bandwidth-hungry applications, peak throughput is not the critical factor for video. Rather, it is a matter of sustained throughput and quality of service,” said Gilad Rozen, CEO of Celeno. “By incrementally applying Celeno’s field-proven OptimizAIR technology over the 11ac standard, video and data streaming in the home will be a lot more robust, enhancing the user experience through QoS and stream balancing techniques, as well as by minimizing packet errors per clients over time.”
Celeno will be showing the video bridge at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week, along with a whole-home IP camera. Celeno is working with Quanta – which makes laptops for Apple and HP, among others – on the IP camera that can be used for security, surveillance and home monitoring applications. The video feeds can be accessed around the home via tablets, laptops and TVs.
Celeno’s CL1830 and CLR260 high-performance Wi-Fi 450 Mbps video-grade chips have been pre-integrated with the cameras to offer concurrent dual-band (2.4 GHz and 5 GHz) Wi-Fi operation and minimized interference.
To create the network, one camera connects directly to the home router and becomes an access point (AP). The other cameras connect wirelessly to the AP over the interference-free 5 GHz network and act simultaneously as both 2.4 GHz APs and 5 GHz clients.
Home automation is a growing opportunity for cable operators such as Comcast, Time Warner Cable and Cox Communications, all of which have launched their own branded services. Celeno’s Weiss said the IP camera video feeds can also be accessed remotely via a cloud and broadband connection, and that MSOs can give the cameras their own look and feel as part of their services.
Celeno also announced a partnership today with Ubee Interactive to develop a range of wireless products that address IPTV service providers’ need for carrier-grade Wi-Fi solutions.
As part of the announcement, Celeno will provide Wi-Fi chips for distribution of video over Wi-Fi in Ubee’s xDSL home gateway product line. Celeno’s chips will enable Ubee to offer whole-home Wi-Fi networking robust enough for HD IPTV distribution, multi-room DVR and over-the-top (OTT) video consumption on tablets anywhere in a home.
Celeno’s chips will also be leveraged to power after-market accessories such as video bridges and USB dongles that will allow service providers to use Wi-Fi-enabled legacy set-top box gateways.
