ITWire

NICTA started work on the technology in 2004 and made its first announcement in 2008 http://www.itwire.com/business-it-news/technology/19731

The technology, known as WiGig has been standardised by the IEEE as 802.11ad. It received final working group approval in July and IEEE Standards Board final approval is planned for December 2012. It can deliver a theoretical maximum throughput of 7Gbps.

Nitero however is not the only chipmaker close to having WiGig chipsets on the market. In July Marvell - another fabless semiconductor company and Wilocity - a company founded in 2007 to develop 60GHz wireless chipsets - announced plans to bring 802.11ad to market that would also support current WiFi technologies in the 2.5GHz and 5GHz bands and to "accelerate Marvell's deployment of WiGig-compliant wireless platforms for computing, networking infrastructure and consumer electronics."

Over a year earlier Qualcomm Atheros and Wilocity announced what they claimed to be the first chipset to support 60GHz wireless for short range in-room communications with seamless handover to 2.4GHz and 5GHz WiFi for greater range, and Panasonic announced that it had successfully developed a 60GHz chipset.

Neither Nitero nor Marvell/Wilocity have given any indication of when they expect to have commercial products available. However, Wikipedia says: "We can expect to see products beginning to hit the market sometime in early 2014."

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