DirectBand
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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. DirectBand uses the 66.75 kHz subcarrier leased by Microsoft from commercial radio broacasters. 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. 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.
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.
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.
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.
