Yes folks, we're back to the drawing board. Again. With a litany of wireless technologies floundering about and struggling to find real traction in the market, a cadre of market powerhouses have joined up to take wireless streaming to the next level -- or so they say, anyway. The newly formed WiGig Alliance aims to use unlicensed 60GHz waves in order to stream just about anything you can think of: HD video, images, phone contacts, instant messages, audio, etc. This "unified" approach differs from most other alternatives, which generally pick one niche (1080p video, for instance) and stick to it. If the more than 15 technology firms have their collective druthers, the WiGig specification will find its way into everything from set-top-boxes to telephones to home stereos, ready and willing to stream to other WiGig-enabled devices at a moment's notice.

The group consists of household names such as Microsoft, LG, Dell, Samsung, Marvell, Nokia, NEC, Intel and Broadcom (just to name a few), and when we spoke to executives about the announcement, they told us that plans were to have the specification available to member organizations in Q4 of this year. The sad part is that this likely means we won't see shipping products with the WiGig logo for another year after that -- if we're lucky. We can't argue that some stability would be nice in this volatile sector; after all, we've been waiting for promising products like Belkin's FlyWire to ship for well over a year. The execs we spoke with couldn't speak on behalf of the partner firms in terms of what WiGig products were looming on the horizon, but as we alluded to earlier, the playing field is wide open. Honestly, we'd love for this to take off and finally give high-bandwidth wireless applications the support it needs to flourish, but as we've seen over the past few years, the road ahead ain't an easy one to walk. The full release is after the break.

IBM ain't the first big fish to dabble in the wireless HD chipset realm, and while we'd heard that the outfit was looking into the matter a year ago, things are seemingly now moving forward. Big Blue has joined hands with MediaTek in a "joint initiative to develop ultra fast chipsets that can wirelessly transmit a full-length high definition movie to and from a home PC, handheld device, retail kiosk or television set nearly as fast as a viewer can push their remote control." Apparently, the happy couple will both utilize their knowledge of millimeter wave (mmWave) radio technology in order to construct chipsets that allow end users to fling a 10GB file to its destination in just "five seconds" -- all without wires, of course. Visions of uncompressed HD streaming, syncing entire music libraries in seconds and giant bonfires fueled entirely by cabling (we kid, we kid) immediately come to mind.

[Via Slashdot]