After Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) the natural next step is Video over Internet Protocol. Video over Internet Protocol is not that big of a problem; unless you want to light up 20 thousand houses in a community then you need a huge internet pipe, but the problem with video streaming poses some challenges when pushed over a Wi-Fi connection.

The bottom line is, just as voice has requirements of pushing a lot of packets in sequence, video has the same requirement but at a larger scale and there are more packets and bigger packets. For a single dwelling, I’ve tested 1080i HD video streaming over 802.11g with success, but for a similar solution for an entire community over WiMAX, I’m not sure how well that will work.

AT&T’s U-Verse service broadcasts video over IP but there is no wireless component. I don’t know of anyone who is happily using the U-Verse service, but if you are, please chime in and give us an update.

Here is an article of interest from FAQ’s section on Wimax.com about hi definition video over WiMAX