New wireless activity tends to center around the 802.11 high throughput standard, as it did at this month’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. But Wi-Fi isn’t the only game in wireless, and a few new technologies, while not in the limelight, are beginning to show promising maturity. These include:

* Near field communications (NFC), in which devices touch or nearly touch to trigger a wireless transaction.

* Ultra Wideband (UWB) wireless, which is spreading through products using the wireless USB specification, and in “in-room” video and audio streaming.

* Wireless sensor protocols stacks, including the rival ZigBee and Z-Wave specifications, that are built atop the 802.15.4 radio standard and can be used in home and industrial settings as well as building automation and energy management applications.

NFC on the brink

NFC is a kind of extremely short-range RFID technology that operates in the 13.56MHz band, which is available worldwide. There are three data rates -- 106K, 212K and 424Kbps -- that operate over just 4 centimeters, or less than 2 inches. Paper-thin tags with an antenna and a tiny data chip are the passive component; they store data and are incorporated into ticketing and payment cards or sandwiched into posters.

The tags can be scanned and read by devices with a NFC reader, which can be built into cell phones (Nokia already has them on some cell phone models), point-of-sale scanners or key fobs. Mastercard and Visa are planning to launch contactless payment cards based on NFC: Tap the card on a point-of-sale terminal, the transaction completes, and your account is debited.

NFC is being shepherded by the NFC Forum, an industry group that launched three years ago with 20 members and now has more than 150, including nearly every big name in chipmaking, handsets, consumer electronics, telecom operators and even financial services.

The Forum will finalize the NFC standard by June 2008, says Gerhard Romen, the forum’s vice chairman and head of Nokia’s NFC market development. Information is being released about NFC testing specifications. Later this year and into 2009, there will be large-scale NFC rollouts, many through the mobile operators, Romen says.

Last October, Starhub, one of three mobile operators in Singapore, announced a trial that will offer a payment service in conjunction with EZ-Link Pte, a government-owned company that operates a contactless NFC-based payment service. The EZ-Link cards can be used to pay for public transport in Singapore as well as purchases in some stores by waving them over a reader.