January 5, 2006 – ANYONE with an interest in developing or regulating the next generation of inflight communications services would be well advised to pay close attention to some of the developments to be highlighted at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show, which gets under way today in Las Vegas.

The four-day event, the most important of its kind in the world, will showcase several communications technologies likely to have a big impact in the consumer arena in the next few years. Inevitably, they will also generate heightened expectations among air travellers who are already accustomed to wireless Internet access in airports and, increasingly, in the air, and looking forward to being able to use their mobile phones in the cabin.

For acronym enthusiasts, the letters to look out for are HSDPA, UWB and, more familiar, VoIP. Respectively they stand for High Speed Downlink Packet Access, Ultra Wideband and Voice over IP. Even as airborne communications regulators and providers wrestle with the challenges of 802.11 WiFi and the GPRS and UMTS third-generation cellular standards, they are now faced with the need to digest this new course of alphabet soup sooner rather than later.

In Las Vegas Samsung Electronics plans to carry out the world’s first public full-speed demonstration of HSDPA, an emerging cellular technology said to be capable of delivering multimedia content to handsets at speeds of up to 3.6Mbit/sec. To put that performance in context, downloading a 4Mb MP3 file would take less than 10 seconds. Samsung maintains that it will be practicable for users to download DVD-quality movies and interactive multimedia games and wirelessly access the Internet at speeds camparable with those of fixed-line ADSL services.

The platform for the demonstration will be Samsung`s own HSDPA handset, incorporating a modem developed by leading wireless technology provider Qualcomm.

A few years ago Ultra Wideband caused a flurry in the inflight industry with the possibility that it would be widely adopted for wireless laptops, with incalculable consequences for the integrity of aircraft avionics. Transmitting ultra-low-power signals – effectively short bursts of noise - across a wide expanse of frequencies simultaneously, UWB was seen as a particularly wild card for the regulators. But then it effectively dropped out of sight as far as aviation was concerned.

Now it’s back, with California company Pulse-LINK planning to show off its gigabit-rate CWave UWB platform, said to be capable of supporting wireless and wired high-definition (HD) audio and video connectivity, HD gaming and multimedia PC applications. The demonstrations will include ultra-low-latency wireless HD gaming between an Xbox 360 and an HDTV, and wireless PC to flat-panel HDTV connections.

Launch market for Pulse-LINK’s UWB technology is the home, where it is expected to support both wired and wireless simultaneous streaming of multiple HDTV programmes, high-quality multi-channel audio, and high-speed data throughout the building. But it can surely only be a matter of time before the technology begins to make itself felt in aircraft cabins.

“Imagine seamlessly connecting the large flat-panel screen in your living room to all the other multimedia devices in your home - from the DVD in the bedroom to the video camera in the family room and more,” comments company founder John Santhoff. “Or walking into your living room with your laptop and with the push of a button wirelessly sending everything on your laptop screen to your flat-panel display for viewing.”

Pulse-LINK also plans to demo HDTV via CWave over electrical wiring. The company claims to be the first and only provider to demonstrate UWB communications over both home electrical power lines and coax cable.

This capability, with its weight-saving potential, along with the huge wireless bandwidth offered by UWB, seems certain to bring this technology back into contention for airborne applications in the fullness of time.

VoIP has already come from nowhere to win the attention of inflight communications providers such as AirCell and Connexion by Boeing. Its apparent costlessness has meant a rapid take-up among the technologically savvy, and AirCell and Connexion have moved to ensure that they are not wrong-footed by the emergence of a mass market for VoIP service. So far that has been ruled out by the essentially computer-to-computer nature of VoIP. This year’s CES will see the debut of a product that could play a part in changing that.

PhoneGnome from TelEvolution of Danville, California, is designed to seamlessly join VoIP communications with a customer`s existing public switched telephone network (PSTN) service. Already commercially available at $119 a unit, PhoneGnome installs between a standard phone line and any broadband connection. Consumers can then make Internet and PSTN phone calls from the same phone and receive the benefit of free calling among PhoneGnome owners.

Once installed, the system also eliminates many of the recurring monthly costs for services such as voicemail, three-way calling, telemarketing screening, and call forwarding and transfer, all of which are free with PhoneGnome.

An event like CES is a fantastic showcase for the plethora of IT and communications technologies currently emerging at breakneck speed for the consumer market. Some will make their mark and some, of course, will be consigned to the dustbin of history. But even a cursory look at the menu for CES 2006 indicates that inflight service providers and regulators need to concentrate ever more closely on the doings of the consumer segment if they are not to be caught out in the not too distant future by waves of demand that they failed to see coming.