The Wi-Fi Alliance and the WiGig Alliance have announced a cooperation agreement to share technology specifications for the development of a next-generation Wi-Fi Alliance certification program supporting Wi-Fi operation in the 60GHz frequency band.
The agreement opens way for the development of products supporting 60GHz technology to expand existing Wi-Fi capabilities.
Targeted primarily for applications that require gigabit speeds, 60GHz products are expected to be used in a wide range of high-performance devices and are also expected to support traditional Wi-Fi networking in the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands, Wi-Fi Alliance said.
Edgar Figueroa, chief executive officer of Wi-Fi Alliance, said: 60GHz device connectivity will be an exciting enhancement to the capabilities of today’s Wi-Fi technologies. It will expand the utility of Wi-Fi, used by hundreds of millions of people every day.
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 60GHz wireless.
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. It is expected that a new class of tri-band Wi-Fi devices will offer multi-gigabit wireless speeds while helping to ensure backward compatibility.
Ali Sadri, president and chairman of the WiGig Alliance, said: “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.”
