The Wi-Fi Alliance and the Wireless Gigabit Alliance (WiGig Alliance) have announced a cooperation agreement for multi-gigabit wireless networking. The Wi-Fi Alliance and the WiGig Alliance will share technology specifications for the development of a next-generation Wi-Fi Alliance certification program supporting Wi-Fi operation in the 60GHz frequency band. This agreement further encourages the development of products supporting 60GHz technology.

“60GHz device connectivity will be an exciting enhancement to the capabilities of today’s Wi-Fi technologies. From its inception, the WiGig specification was designed to work on a wide variety of devices, making it a compelling input as we begin to define our certification program for 60 GHz wireless,” said Wi-Fi Alliance chief executive officer Edgar Figueroa.

Device connectivity in the 60GHz band will complement the current family of Wi-Fi technologies. Targeted primarily for applications that require gigabit speeds, 60GHz products are expected to be used in a wide range of high-performance devices. A significant portion, if not all, of these devices are expected to also support traditional Wi-Fi networking in the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands.

The WiGig Alliance, which shares many member companies in common with the Wi-Fi Alliance, was formed to unify the next generation of multi-gigabit wireless products by encouraging the adoption and widespread use of 60GHz wireless technology worldwide. The WiGig specification defines protocols to deliver data transfer rates measured in gigabits rather than megabits and supports a new range of applications and usages. The specification also defines procedures to enable WiGig-compliant devices to hand over sessions to operate in the 2.4GHz or 5GHz band. It is expected that a new class of tri-band Wi-Fi Certified devices will offer multi-gigabit wireless speeds while helping to ensure backward compatibility.

“Now that our specification is complete and published, it’s time to set our sights on driving a great user experience through interoperability and certification. We are happy to work with the Wi-Fi Alliance to extend multi-gigabit capabilities to the Wi-Fi technology portfolio,” said Ali Sadri, president and chairman of the WiGig Alliance

Tags: Wi-Fi, WiGig