WiGig Alliance to begin testing high-speed wireless technology

A new wireless technology that could transmit data at 3Gbit/s to 5Gbit/s will undergo its first trials this week, and a series of key technology vendors are lined up to test products using the WiGig standard.

The technology runs over the 60GHz spectrum which has almost no interference issues so it can deliver speeds far in advance of standard Wi-Fi connections, according to the WiGig Alliance.

The technology has several notable backers, including Microsoft, Nokia, Samsung, Cisco and Intel, while the WiGig Alliance is in discussions with the Wi-Fi Alliance to form a consensus on how specifications for the technologies could co-exist.

The Plugfest event in California this week will see 10 companies from the 50 members of the Alliance testing products using the technology, although details on which companies are involved have not been made public.

Ali Sadri, chairman and president of the WiGig Alliance, explained that Plugfest is an important step in the evolution of the technology, which could be in use by as soon as mid-2012.

"The high throughput means you can send uncompressed video streams or sync your smartphone with your PC in a few seconds, rather than minutes, while locations such as coffee shops could offer vastly improved browsing speeds," he told V3.

"At the event the first products using the technology will be tested and those confident everything is working correctly could start launching products by the middle of 2012, although the official specifications will likely be out by the start of 2013."

Sadri explained that the technology works over distances of 10 to 15 metres, making it ideal for use in the home or a small office, adding that it could be used in conjunction with Wi-Fi depending on the user's distance from the access point.

"After a certain distance the system could hand-off to standard Wi-Fi so you can still access the internet from a greater distance, but close to the access point you'd get the very high WiGig speeds," he explained.

Filomena Berardi, senior analyst for the connectivity group at IMS Research, told V3 that WiGig has a number of interesting potential uses.

"The most interesting are tri-band solutions, i.e. a device could switch between 2.4GHz, 5GHz and 60GHz depending on the application, and the user would be unaware which frequency they were operating in," she said.

"Therefore, for in-room type applications like fast video transfer your device would use 60GHz but for connecting to the internet it would convert back to 5GHz or 2.4GHz."

Berardi added that another real-world use could be a WiGig kiosk in an airport where a film could be downloaded to a tablet or smartphone in seconds and then watched on the plane.