CES 2006 - Another sign that this year's CES is one big 3G demonstration, LG will be showing off MediaFLO technology at its booth. MediaFLO was developed by Qualcomm and is a streaming media technology that will be covered with a national network now under construction by Qualcomm. FLO technology needs far less transmitters than cellular networks, more like TV broadcasts. Qualcomm is actually placing many of its transmitters on TV towers.
FLO has a number of interesting features, notably being full QVGA video at 30 frames a second. Qualcomm also notes that changing channels should take little more than a second and will not have buffering delays.
Verizon Wireless has already announced it will support the technology when it's ready for prime time, which is expected to be late 2006 or early 2007.
Besides the live demonstration of MediaFLO at CES, Cingular will be showing off its 3G HSDPA network. Several handsets should be announced for that, though the first phones to ship will be UMTS only and not support the faster HSDPA.