DirectBand
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DirectBand™ is a North American wireless datacast network owned and operated by Microsoft. It uses FM radio broadcasts in over 100 cities to constantly transmit data to a variety of devices, including wristwatches and home weather stations.
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[edit] How it works
DirectBand uses the 66.75 kHz subcarrier leased by Microsoft from commercial radio broadcasters. This subcarrier delivers about 12 kbit/s of data per tower, for over 100 MB per day per city. Data includes traffic, sports, weather, stocks, news, movie times, calendar appointments, and local time.
[edit] Not like RDS
It is important to note that DirectBand does not use the RDS (Radio Data System) subcarrier. RDS is a different and lower bandwidth (~1.18 kbit/s) subcarrier primarily used for radio station information and traffic.
[edit] Push network
DirectBand is a push network -- new content is delivered every 2 minutes. For fault tolerance reasons most cities have two broadcast towers delivering the same content.
[edit] Receivers
There are a variety of DirectBand receivers. All use a small (2.794 mm x 2.794 mm x 860 µm) radio receiver and an ARM7-based processor.
[edit] Microsoft design
DirectBand is a product of the Smart Personal Objects Technology (SPOT) team at Microsoft. MSN Direct is the consumer brand that Microsoft uses for devices that receive content from the DirectBand network.
[edit] FM subcarrier usage
RDS versus DirecBand's utilization of the FM subcarrier spectrum, 100 kHz FM channel allocation assumed.
[edit] See also
Related technologies
Related topics
[edit] External links
Official websites
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