World Without Wires: Wi-Fi Alliance Endorses WiGig
The Wi-Fi Alliance, the organization that certifies the wireless industry standard, said this morning that it is allying with Wireless Gigabit Alliance to promote WiGig, a new short-range wireless specification capable of delivering data speeds of up to seven gigabits per second in the 60GHz band.
That’s about 10 times faster than Wi-Fi, which operates in the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands. And it’s fast enough to stream high-definition video without the need for HDMI or DisplayPort connections–assuming your video source and monitor are close to each another, preferably in the same room.
Though WiGig can carry a lot of data, its range is significantly shorter than Wi-Fi N, the latest iteration of the Wi-Fi specification. And it doesn’t handle obstructions nearly so well. Which is why the announcement of today’s Wi-Fi Alliance agreement likely heralds a tri-band Wi-Fi standard, one that would use 60GHz WiGig–or a similar technology like WirelessHD (said to support speeds of 10-28Gbps) when it is available and fall back on slower, longer-range Wi-Fi connections in the 2.4 and 5 GHz bands when it isn’t.