Rival bodies battle for multigigabit wireless local network market

Stuart Corner
Friday, 18 September 2009 07:22

IT Industry - Strategy

When asked to comment on the formation of the WiGig alliance in May Lianne Caetano, the executive director of WirelessHD, told iTWire that WirelessHD had a substantial lead on WiGig. "At this time, WirelessHD remains the only 60GHz standard for consumer applications that has a completed specification (4Gbps actual data rates) that has been available for almost two years, an active compliance test programme with interoperability testing, and products now available to consumers in stores. WirelessHD considers industry harmonisation important for market acceptance and adoption and will continue to practice good etiquette in these matters with the different 60GHz standards groups."

She added: "As the first and only effort to deliver a complete specification that employs 60GHz for wireless distribution of uncompressed HD video, audio and data, WirelessHD feels that momentum in 60GHz, such as demonstrated by WiGig's announcement, is a validation of the Consortium's vision originally announced in October 2006. It is also a positive sign that WiGig has recognised the benefits of this radio spectrum for data, much the same as WirelessHD announced as its future direction at CES this past January, highlighting that the next WirelessHD specification will target high-speed data support."

She also said that the direction of the alliance was unclear. "We have been involved with this group since its inception. Our prior understanding was that WiGig would be promoting an all purpose technology platform that would be more suited to shorter range, general data applications and therefore, less capable of meeting the higher-end requirements of HD audio/video and higher data rate data applications (greater than 2Gbps). Also unclear is that there is already a standards effort for 60GHz wireless LAN through IEEE802.11ad that is slated to finish its work in 2012-2013. This appears to be confusing given the common leadership of the two groups."