Rival bodies battle for multigigabit wireless local network market

Stuart Corner
Friday, 18 September 2009 08:22

IT Industry - Strategy

The WiGig Alliance - the body formed earlier this year to promote standards for WLANs operating at 60GHz and delivering throughput of several gigabits per second - has announced five new members, bringing total membership to more than 20. Meanwhile the rival WirelessHD Consortium is gathering momentum.

According to WiGig Alliance president and chairman, Ali Sadri, "Our newest members represent a cross-section of chipmakers, device manufacturers and test equipment vendors that reinforce our efforts to develop and certify a technology that will span multiple platforms...[they are] bringing expertise that will be critical to creating a cross-industry ecosystem of products based on the WiGig specification."

The new members are Toshiba - which has also joined the organisation's board of directors; Agilent Technologies; Beam Networks, Ralink Technology Corporation and Texas Instruments.

According to the alliance its members are defining a unified specification that will enable PCs, consumer electronics and handheld devices to communicate without wires at gigabit speeds within a typical room. "WiGig technology will leverage the unlicensed 60GHz spectrum and address performance and power requirements of many wireless devices and platforms, while coexisting with and complementing existing and future 802.11 wireless systems, driving an interoperable ecosystem of easy-to-use, very high-speed and energy-efficient wireless products.

The technology is being touted as enabling "a true high-performance wireless ecosystem encompassing cell-phone centric, laptop centric and TV centric applications. The WiGig specification is expected to be available to member companies by the end of 2009. In parallel the alliance is developing a plan to certify the interoperability of WiGig products.

However there are a number of other competing initiatives, including one to which most of the WiGig founders belong. WiGig's founders include: Atheros Communications, Broadcom, Dell, Intel, LG Electronics, Marvell International, MediaTek, Microsoft, NEC, Nokia, Panasonic, Samsung Electronics and Wilocity. They are joined by contributors NXP, Realtek, STMicroelectronics and Tensorcom.

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