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How to jam the neighbourhood WLAN, flatten your battery, and waste money: courtesy LG Electronics.

It's still not confirmed by LG itself, but Korean reports say that a wireless LCD television, using WiFi - 802.11g - technology, is about to be launched. If you want to be really, really unpopular with your neighbours, buy one.

According to Korea Times, the product will be launched imminently, with the object of "allowing customers to move a flat panel TV around, without having the inconvenience of unplugging power cords and TV cables and moving other electronic appliances."

For anybody who lives in an urban area, this could be the start of a nightmare. There are only three non-overlapping WiFi channels in the 2.4 GHz band: channel 1, channel 6 and channel 11 (or, outside America, channel 13) and to a greater or lesser extent, all the other imaginary channels generate interference for those three.

For example: in my street in North London, there are six "available" WiFi networks broadcasting strongly enough for me to see when I switch on. Four of them are on channel 6 (the default) and as a result, reception on that channel varies between poor and none. Poor means about the same speed as a modem on a noisy line. None means what it says: "A network cable is unplugged" as Windows puts it. I've switched to channel 1, and life is back to normal.

The sort of person who wants one of these portable TV displays will, thank goodness, probably not use it wirelessly for long, because video needs good bandwidth. Any degradation in the signal will be visible. There's also the problem of latency: the wireless network introduces a delay so that the wireless screen won't be in synch with any other TV.

But to get good TV over WiFi, you will need to use a lot of the available streaming bandwidth; and that means two things. First, a lot of interference for other users, and second, less available bandwidth for you as soon as anybody else tries to do anything.

And of course, if anybody else gets a worm, the system will get flooded with traffic. WiFi is ethernet; it assumes that people will work with the normal protocols. Worms don't do that: they just spew data out, and can actually cause access points to shut down.

This will probably turn out to be an example of a good idea in a laboratory, but not a bright notion in the real world.

According to reporter Kim Sung-jin the device will be the 15LW10 LCD TV, and it has one other dubious feature: battery life. "A fully charged battery allows the LCD TV to be watched for a maximum of three hours," said the report.

This idea didn't work for Microsoft's "Mira" project, otherwise known as the Smart Display; let's hope it equally thoroughly doesn't catch on in urban apartment blocks, or there will be war.