TV remotes may be the gateway to a pervasive wireless mesh

The progress that wireless devices have made in the consumer space is nothing short of breathtaking. In the developed world, nearly everyone has a cellphone, and it's difficult to go anywhere in an urban center and not have a half-dozen WiFi networks within signal range. A lot of the focus in this space has been on providing more bandwidth to devices like smart phones and routers, but at least some companies are betting that the next frontier in wireless is in cheap, low-power devices. Individually, they'll use a tiny fraction of the bandwidth of the hardware we're familiar with; but, if things go according to plan, there will be a lot more of these devices. The devices themselves are based on the IEEE's 802.15 standard, which is intended for what the organization terms "personal area networks." In contrast to WiFi or even Bluetooth, 802.15.4 class devices typically only have a bandwidth of a few hundred Kbps, which puts them decidedly on the low end of the communications scale. That bandwidth, however, is more than sufficient for a wide variety of common uses; the Zigbee standard for wireless smart appliances has been built on top of 802.15.4.