MS-Next

We don’t wanna say we told you so, but, ya know, we did. On Monday, Microsoft filed a mystery application with the FCC for an enigmatic wireless device that could be used to talk over the Internet. Sounds like a VoiP device, right?

Not really. The device is described as being used for “consumer broadband access and networking,” which doesn’t sound like vanilla VoIP to me. Microsoft goes on to say that the device would use OFDM as its communications protocol, not WiFi or Bluetooth. Well, why not? The standard OFDM (orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing) is a modulation scheme that is used widely in upcoming 4G standards of the future. But with wireless access gaining momentum, and the all-around arms race for bandwidth, 4G starts to make sense, in a crazy, crazy kind of way.

The idea of a next-gen, high-bandwidth capable phone sounded to these ears like the Zune Phone, so we did some poking, called some sources, and waded into the wonderful world of Zune. One thing led to another, and we’ve determined that there is a whole lot more going on at Bear Creek in Redmond than we figured.

With 3G on the rise, 4G is still the far future. With popular providers like T-Mobile still struggling to put out their 3G networks, anything beyond is sci-fi. A little digging, however, and we found this press release from August of last year, in which Sprint/Nextel announced its plans to build out a 4G network based on the IEEE 802.16e mobile WiMax standard. The 802.16 standards use OFDM, the exact same modulation protocol as the Microsoft device in the FCC filing.

Beginning to get the picture, yes?

If this all fits together, it looks like MS is working on a mobile WiMax-enabled Zune Phone, which would have download speeds of up to 2Mbps, fast enough for the Xbox-to-Zune streaming we’ve heard about, and fast enough for just about anything else the Zune Phone might be used for.

So now that we know that the Zune Phone is real, and that it’s in development, what else can we say about it? Tons.

The first real news is that we can expect to hear an announcement from Redmond about it before March 17, St. Patrick’s Day, at which time we should learn the name of the device. At the same time, we should also learn other launch specifics, and here’s where it gets incredibly juicy; our source says that, pending FCC approval, the specter-like Zune Phone will hit the streets sometime in May, a full month before the iPhone.

Full story & source: CrunchGear

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 11th, 2007 at 4:09 pm and is filed under Hardware, News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.