WiGig is nearly ready for primetime as evidenced by the Wi-Fi Alliance's new certification program, aimed at validating interoperability for WiGig products. The certification brand will be designated with a new logo that consumers can look for to ensure they are buying interoperable WiGig products, which are expected to start hitting the market in 2014.
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Wi-Fi Alliance's new WiGig branding. |
In addition, the alliance recently transferred the WiGig Serial Extension Specification to the USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF), so anything now connected by a wired USB can in the future be linked wirelessly via WiGig. The Wi-Fi Alliance also entered a liaison agreement with the Video Electronics Standards Assocation (VESA), enabling the groups to work jointly on WiGig-enabled display port solutions for connecting connect PCs and handhelds to monitors, projectors and HDTVs.
"These are milestones on our path toward WiGig becoming a widely available solution for consumer electronics and handsets," Kelly Davis-Fellner, the Wi-Fi Alliance's marketing and program management director, told FierceBroadbandWireless.
She said the Wi-Fi Alliance, which has now fully integrated the WiGig Alliance under a merger agreement announced in January 2013, is already running early-stage WiGig plug-fests.
"It takes a fair number of plug-fests to get to a test bed that's populated with products from multiple vendors," she said. "We'll be on a fairly regular cadence of plug-fest events now through potentially the middle of next year at least as the solutions start to mature."
WiGig operates in the unlicensed 60 GHz band and offers short-range multi-gigabit connections with speeds up to 7 Gbps. Many products certified for interoperable WiGig operation will be equipped with Wi-Fi, enabling seamless handover between the two technologies, said the Wi-Fi Alliance.
WiGig is being eyed by some as a potential tool for small cell backhaul. Davis-Fellner said promoting that use is not a focus for the Wi-Fi Alliance at this point, but she added that WiGig "is a pipe, and you can do lots of different things with a pipe."
For more:
- see this Wi-Fi Alliance release
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