Wi-Fi Alliance gets the Gig
10th May 2010.
WiGig is, as you will remember, a 60GHz next-generation wireless standard. Operating in that part of the spectrum means it is ideal for fairly short range stuff (say up to 10m), but gives great bandwidth up to 7Gb/sec.
Well, the WiGig team (Wireless Gigabit Alliance if you must) have certainly gained first-mover advantage. Not only is their standard pretty much finalised, they've also penned a deal with the Wi-Fi Alliance. This deal means that WiGig becomes part of the Wi-Fi family, with the wide public recognition that brings.
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Although the standard will probably be aimed at beaming High Definition tv signals around the home to begin with, it isn't hard to imagine WiGig devices daisy-chaining together to cover the whole home and overcome the 10m limit. WiGig is backwards compatible with 802.11b/g/n too. A 7Gb/s wireless home network, sir? Why, thank you very much.WiGig partners can start producing kit immediately based on the standards, and that's an impressive list, including: Atheros, Broadcom, Cisco, DELL, Intel, Marvell, MediaTek, Microsoft, NEC, Nokia, nVidia, Panasonic, Samsung, Toshiba, Wilocity, AMD, Agilent, Beam, Harman, NXP, Peraso, Ralink, Realtek, SKtelecom, ST, Texas Instruments, TMC. So expect kit to start appearing in the shops and online later this year.
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