The 802.11ad WiGig community looks to be getting even stronger thanks to an agreement between Intel and Qualcomm (NASDAQ:QCOM) where the two companies are laying the ground work for interoperability in the 802.11ad ecosystem.
Intel and Qualcomm Atheros announced this week that they have successfully demonstrated multi-gigabit interoperability between their respective 802.11ad WiGig solutions. Such a milestone should help pave the way for industry development of 802.11ad WiGig devices that can communicate and connect seamlessly with each other at speeds of up to 4.6 Gbps.
Rahul Patel, senior vice president and general manager, connectivity at Qualcomm Technologies, said during a media workshop in San Diego this week that Qualcomm is interested in doing this kind of collaboration with other WiGig companies as well.
Qualcomm Atheros and Intel engineers worked for months in each other's labs, running countless tests that spanned many use cases and scenarios, including peer-to-peer connections between Intel and Qualcomm Atheros 802.11ad WiGig based clients and Qualcomm Atheros 802.11ad WiGig powered access points, otherwise known as wireless routers. They report having achieved multi-gigabit real data throughput between their devices.
"While more work lies ahead, our collaboration lays the groundwork for a large ecosystem of interoperable commercial 802.11ad products across networking, mobile and computing segments," the companies wrote in a joint blog post. "We are excited about the new capabilities 802.11ad enables — from 4K display connectivity to tri-band (2.4 GHz, 5 GHz and 60 GHz) Wi-Fi networking and high-speed cellular offload."
Signs are encouraging for the WiGig industry. At CES 2016, a lot of 60 GHz products started to emerge, including those from Peraso Technologies, a small Toronto-based semiconductor company that launched its first WiGig W110 chipset into production. The company counts itself among the few companies in the world, led by Intel and Qualcomm, that have announced production silicon for WiGig.
TP-Link used CES 2016 to unveil its Talon AD7200 multi-band Wi-Fi router, which it called the world's first multi-band router based on 802.11ad powered by Qualcomm Atheros solutions. It's expected to be in U.S. stores early this year.
For more:
- see this blog
- see this RCR Wireless story
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