WiGig Alliance completes multi-gigabit 60GHz wireless specification: let the streaming begin
By Darren Murph 
posted December 10th 2009 9:00AM
posted December 10th 2009 9:00AM
We had a talk with Dr. Ali Sadri (the group's chairman and president) as well as Mark Grodzinsky (board director and marketing work group chair) in order to get a better idea of what's at play here, and frankly, we're anxious to see this get implemented into... well, just about anything. WiGig v1.0 supports data transmission rates up to 7Gbps, and if living in a house full of WiGig-enabled devices, you could finally envision streaming HD content from a bedroom PC to an HDTV and a living room netbook without any wires whatsoever. In the case of the netbook, there's even a chance that the embedded WiGig module could support faster transfer rates than the sockets around the edges, which would simultaneously enable wireless to be faster than the wired (at least in this scenario) and your brain to melt.
Finally, the group has picked up four new members -- NVIDIA, AMD, SK Telecom and TMC -- though unfortunately, WiGig wouldn't comment on the future availability of 60GHz products. We were told that they would be shocked if anyone had a prototype 60GHz device on the CES show floor, but you can bet that won't stop us from looking. Oh, and if we had to take a wild guess, we'd surmise that companies interested in speeding up their own offerings will be jumping on this quick, so hopefully you'll be ditching 2.4GHz once and for all come next summer(ish).
WiGig Alliance Announces Completion of its Multi-Gigabit Wireless Specification
Four members join alliance, including leaders in PC display market, adding breadth to diverse, multi-industry membership
BEAVERTON, Ore. – December 10, 2009 – Wireless Gigabit Alliance (WiGig), the organization advancing the adoption and widespread use of 60 GHz wireless technology worldwide, today announced the completion of its unified wireless specification. The WiGig specification enables high performance wireless display and audio and provides data transfer rates more than 10 times faster than today's wireless LANs, extending Wi-Fi technology while supporting backward compatibility with existing Wi-Fi devices. The completed specification is now ready for member review and is anticipated to be made available to WiGig adopter members in Q1 2010.
"When we launched the WiGig Alliance in May, we announced our plan to complete the industry's first unified 60 GHz specification by Q4 2009, and we are proud to deliver on this promise to the industry," said Dr. Ali Sadri, president and chairman of the Wireless Gigabit Alliance. "We're rapidly paving the way for the introduction of the next generation of high-performance wireless products – PCs, mobile handsets, TVs and displays, Blu-ray disc players, digital cameras and many more."
Specification Highlights
The WiGig version 1.0 specification includes the following key elements:
• Supports data transmission rates up to 7 Gbps – more than ten times faster than the highest 802.11n rate
• Supplements and extends the 802.11 Medium Access Control (MAC) layer and is backward compatible with the IEEE 802.11 standard
• Physical layer enables both the low power and the high performance WiGig devices, guaranteeing interoperability and communication at gigabit rates
• Protocol adaptation layers are being developed to support specific system interfaces including data buses for PC peripherals and display interfaces for HDTVs, monitors and projectors
• Support for beamforming, enabling robust communication at distances beyond 10 meters
• Widely used advanced security and power management for WiGig devices
"WiGig has reached a milestone with the completion of its specification as promised by year end, demonstrating the organization's commitment to deliver," said Craig Mathias, a Principal with the wireless and mobile advisory firm Farpoint Group. "By complementing Wi-Fi and enabling multi-gigabit speeds, the versatile specification is a very significant achievement on the road to the next generation of wireless LAN products."
New Members Join WiGig Alliance
WiGig Alliance has experienced steady growth with four new members joining in Q4, with total membership approaching 30 industry-leading companies. NVIDIA has joined the organization's board of directors, and AMD, SK Telecom and TMC have joined as contributor members. Semiconductor industry pillars NVIDIA and AMD boost the organization's support for PC wireless display applications. SK Telecom, the largest South Korean telecommunications company, and TMC, an independent testing and certification lab headquartered in China, add depth and bring additional expertise to the organization.
"NVIDIA recognizes the general market trend toward wire-free interfaces. Today, display interfaces are at an inflection point where the next generation solutions will feature wireless display connections for PCs, game consoles, notebooks and mobile devices with PC monitors and TVs," said Devang Sachdev, Technology Marketing Manager at NVIDIA and WiGig Board Member. "NVIDIA supports open standards for wireless transmission of data for display and interfaces such as PCIe, USB, etc., and we see this as aligned with WiGig's work."
"We are extremely proud that the extent of our membership includes world leaders from the consumer electronics, mobile and PC segments. This diversity of representation and participation is enabling WiGig to deliver innovative wireless solutions that will meet market demand in a timely manner," said Sadri.
The completed specification will be made available to WiGig members in Q1 2010. For more information, visit www.wigig.org.
About the WiGig Alliance
The WiGig Alliance envisions a global wireless ecosystem of interoperable, extremely high performance consumer electronics, handheld devices and personal computers that work together seamlessly to connect people in the digital age. WiGig technology enables multi-gigabit-speed wireless communications among these devices and fuels industry convergence to a single radio using the readily available, unlicensed 60 GHz spectrum. By bringing together the leading manufacturers of semiconductors, personal computers, consumer electronics and handheld devices, WiGig Alliance is creating a comprehensive specification to drive a global ecosystem of easy-to-use, interoperable, high speed wireless products.
Among the companies that comprise the WiGig Alliance board of directors are Atheros Communications, Inc., Broadcom Corporation, Dell Inc., Intel Corporation, LG Electronics Inc., Marvell International LTD., MediaTek Inc., Microsoft Corporation, NEC Corporation, Nokia Corporation, NVIDIA Corporation, Panasonic Corporation, Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., Toshiba Corporation and Wilocity. These companies are joined by contributors that include Agilent Technologies Inc., AMD, Beam Networks, NXP, Ralink Technology Corporation, Realtek, SK Telecom, STMicroelectronics, Tensorcom, Inc., Texas Instruments and TMC. For more information, please visit www.wigig.org.
I'll still to my bonded gigabit physical connections, thanks. \m/
Every wireless technology has underperformed its wired counterpart even if stable enough to consider using.
* stick
There, corrected myself just in time to be down-ranked.
@E71
Advantages of wires:
* Consistent throughput
* Higher throughput
* More secure
* More reliable
* Cheaper
* Lower power
Advantages of wireless:
* No wires
It's a pretty easy decision for me.
@jgpuff You forgot a couple advantages for wireless
*Much easier to share with others (without being practically in the same room, negated for those with the foresight to wire their homes with ethernet)
*NO WIRES (meaning, moving about, going to another room: again for those that didn't wire their homes)
@jgpuff LOL! Very well put!
Hot damn, screw SATA III, get me a WiGig hard drive
And just how much power will one need to send 60GHz through a wall? Hundreds of Watts?
@Joylove
true. contrary to the article, I was under the impression this was an extremely short range technology. For instance, transmitting wireless HD video from a STB to an HDTV. Guess I was wrong.
@(Unverified) Same here. Previous development attempts at 60GHz have been aimed at single-room systems (namely HD over several meter range). High frequencies are badly attenuated by walls, so I can't understand how this technology could compete with WiFi for whole-home coverage unless it's combined with something else (some kind of 'tunnel', perhaps, which can get it through a wall and into another room?)
@jgpuff : Powerline maybe ? As a backbone it would defiinitely work to share your internet throughout the house and if WiGig APs are cheap enough (~$15 once it hits mass market level) you could pretty easily put one in every room. Though if my experience with Powerline is in any way typical, they better have each of those APs also regenerate the signal on the AC lines as well...or half the house will lose the internet every time the dishwasher starts up...
But even if they ever get Powerline up to 1gbps it would STILL be the bottleneck of the whole system. This WiGig stuff sounds kind of like an ultra high bandwidth Bluetooth/IR type implementation -> Not really suitable to extend network coverage beyond the reach of wires, but literally just just to remove the hassle and unsightliness of the wires themselves.
@OddManOut
Powerline?
I think according to transmission line theory, at 60GHz the kind of wiring that you use to carry electricity doesn't even exist. Seriously, it'd be just as if the signal were propagating through air anyway. Even in the GHz range, if you want to send a signal a long way, you don't send it down a wire, you send it inside a long tube of metal (a waveguide); the signal goes through the air, the tube keeps it on the path you want.
I think to carry this you'd really need coax or a simulation of it like shielded twisted pair.
thats sweet tech, no wires would b nice...but isnt intel coming out with light peak soon, and that will b faster and it can provide power(they already have infiniband)
@hexideciml
I wouldn't see why the two couldn't coexist in a house, if this new standard provides a longer range
@Ryujin
personally i'll stick to the fiber channel over the wireless any day. i would use this for my laptop or any other portable device. other than that though ill be stickin to cables, esp if they are pushin 100Gbps
I'm impressed they can make affordable 60GHz transceivers now, wasn't too long ago that was only financially doable for the big boys like NASA and such.
@Wwhat They can't necessarily make affordable ones yet...Having the standard in place will encourage the development necessary to make the radios affordable.
I'd guess that we'll see premium-level products sporting this at CES 2011 with another year or two before before things become properly affordable.
@jgpuff It depends on what you call affordable. Consumer pricing... true.
Enterprise solutions are currently out there and they rule. About $10k for point to point Gigabit radios with a quarter mile range at full duplex. It's a lot cheaper than fiber.
wow..
Weegee Alliance
I seriously hope they take other folks that have been using this tech into consideration while they begin saturating this range. I have enough trouble keeping the radios up that I work with as it is.
To make joylove's point clearer, in faint hope that Darren Murph will fix his article:
60GHz WILL NOT GO THROUGH WALLS!!!!!!11!1!!
It is only useful to remove the wiring mess around the TV, and, maybe if you are lucky, reach the back speakers.
60GHz? You'll be lucky to use that across a room. It'll never get through a wall. And even in air it'll attenuate quickly, so in order to get a decent distance they'll have to pump a lot more power out than they do with lower frequencies. And if your laptop is on your lap, that's going right into your nads.
This doesn't sound like it's going to replace Wi-Fi to me.
@spin cycle
since when do laptops have that kind of power available in their batteries anyway?
The more I look at this logo and name, the more I keep dropping the 2nd "i" and pronouncing it "wigg". Is this the wireless solution for baldness?
I'm pretty sure you just have to reverse the polarities and recalibrate the mod-phased inducers--then 60ghz will go through walls like butter.
@genghiskhan I tried every one of your suggestions, and I still can't get the butter to go through my walls. Took forever just to get all the butter off my walls... ;-P