Sibeam today announced the closing of $36.5 million in Series D funding with Best Buy and Cisco now investing in Sibeam’s 60 GHz wireless chipsets for lossless HDTV between televisions, DVD players and computers, as well as other applications.
Based on the WirelessHD standard, the second generation of SiBEAM’s WirelessHD chipsets, deliver a 4Gbps data transfer rate and support HDCP and DTCP content protection that can be designed into A/V receivers, home theater-in-a-box systems, Blu-ray players, set-top boxes, media center PCs, and consumer laptops.
In other news, Cisco introduced the CRS-3 router that it says can handle Internet traffic 12 times faster than rival products. Cisco says it could deliver every movie ever made in four minutes over the Internet. The CRS-3 will be available in the third quarter and sell for $90,000 and up. It is the successor to the CRS-1.
AT&T, the biggest U.S. telecommunications company, said it had successfully completed a 100-gigabits-per-second field test of the new router and expects it to be ready for commercial deployment in the next few years.
Meanwhile, Verizon Communications and Cisco’s biggest rival Juniper Networks said they completed a field trial at a similar speed with a 100G interface on the Juniper T1600 Core Router. Sprint will deploy Juniper’s SRX5800 Services Gateways, with multiple 1 Gigabit Ethernet and 10 Gigabit Ethernet connections at their distribution data centers throughout the United States.
The news comes a week ahead of the expected announcement of U.S. Federal Communications Commission’s National Broadband plan, aimed at boosting high-speed Internet adoption in the country.
The FCC is expected to propose that operators provide minimum Internet data transmission speeds of 100 megabits per second (Mbps) to 100 million homes within a decade.
