Wi-Fi Alliance and the Wireless Gigabit Alliance (also known as WiGig Alliance) announced an agreement between both international short-range wireless industry groups, will let the Wi-Fi Alliance carve out specs and standards to support Wi-Fi operation in the 60-GHz frequency band in a bid to make Wi-Fi faster. By contrast, Wi-Fi today operates in the 2.4-GHz and 5- GHz bands.
The WiGig Alliance last month released a specification for wireless networks that use frequencies in the 60GHz band for throughput as high as 7G bps (bits per second). The alliance is expected to set up a certification system next year and anticipates WiGig-based consumer products to begin reaching the market in 2011.
WiGig announced a specification in December, which it said at the time would result in data transfer rates between devices of more than 10 times faster than today’s wireless LANs, or up to 7 Gbit/sec., about 10 times the 802.11n rate.
Wi-Fi in the 60-GHz band could be the first step toward helping consumers go truly wireless, says Xavier Ortiz, an analyst at ABI Research. The drawback is that the higher frequency waves have much shorter range and won’t go through walls well.
“We believe there are three key wireless applications: wireless local area networking (WLAN) using Wifi, wireless personal area networking (WPAN) using Bluetooth, and wireless video area networking (WVAN) using WirelessHD,” says John LeMoncheck, SiBeam CEO.