High-Speed Wireless Could Be in Products Next Year

High-Speed Wireless Could Be in Products Next Year

The Wireless Gigabit Alliance has completed a new specification that makes possible wireless LANs 10 times faster than today's Wi-Fi. The new WiGig spec is backward compatible with existing Wi-Fi hardware and may appear in products in the first quarter of 2010. But consumer adoption of the WiGig specification may be slower.


The Wireless Gigabit Alliance, or WiGig, has completed a new specification that makes possible high-performance Relevant Products/Services wireless display and audio with rates 10 times faster than current-generation wireless LANs. The new spec works to extend Wi-Fi technology Relevant Products/Services and supports backward capability with existing Wi-Fi devices. WiGig members will have access to the spec to provide faster wireless in new products in the first quarter of 2010.

"When we launched the WiGig alliance in May, we announced our plan to complete the industry's first unified 60-GHz specification by Q4 2009, and we are proud to deliver on this promise to the industry," said Dr. Ali Sadri, president and chairman of WiGig. "We're rapidly paving the way for the introduction of the next generation of high-performance wireless products -- PCs, mobile handsets, TVs and displays, Blu-ray Disc players, digital cameras, and many more."

Getting into the Consumer Ecosystem

Craig Mathias, a principal with the wireless and mobile advisory firm Farpoint Group, said WiGig has reached a milestone by completing its specification as promised by year-end. "By complementing Wi-Fi and enabling multi-gigabit speeds, he said, "the versatile specification is a very significant achievement on the road to the next generation of wireless LAN Relevant Products/Services products."

Michael Gartenberg, a vice president at Interpret, is also impressed with the new spec. When it comes to wireless, he said, faster is always better. But there remains an important question to be answered: How do you get consumers to keep upgrading their gear?

"Consumers have to upgrade everything if they are going to get the total benefit. That means it's not only my router, but it's my routers and my computers and my phones and my media players and all the other gadgets that are out there," Gartenberg said. "As the consumer ecosystem gets larger every year, it takes longer and longer for these standards to really become standard for use."

Is Fast Too Fast?

WiGig members seem prepared to cross that bridge when they come to it -- and the group is attracting new members. Four new companies joined WiGig in the fourth quarter, giving the group nearly 30 industry leaders under its banner. Nvidia has joined the organization's board of directors, and AMD, SK Telecom, and TMC have joined as contributor members.

"Nvidia recognizes the general market trend toward wire-free interfaces. Today, display interfaces are at an inflection point where the next-generation solutions will feature wireless display connections for PCs, game consoles, notebooks and mobile devices with PC monitors and TVs," said Devang Sachdev, technology marketing manager at Nvidia and a WiGig board member. "Nvidia supports open standards for wireless transmission of data Relevant Products/Services for display and interfaces such as PCIe, USB, etc., and we see this as aligned with WiGig's work."

Still, there is the time factor when it comes to marketplace adoption. It takes time, for example, for new routers to become available. It takes time for the technology to make its way into laptops and iPods and smartphones.

"We are not even at the point where I can get 802.11n on every device, even if I wanted to, because they haven't quite adopted it across the board, and yet we are already on to one generation beyond n," Gartenberg said. "This may be a case where fast may be too fast and it's going to take a little time for consumers to catch up."