Wi-Fi Alliance And WiGig To Unify, Ramp Up Development On 60GHz Products

With our powers combined... wait, how does that phrase go? At any rate, it sure seems appropriate here, given that the Wi-Fi Alliance and the Wireless Gigabit Alliance are announcing plans to unify. WiGig has been floundering around for a while now, but paired up with the far more known Wi-Fi Alliance, it could very easily gain a ton of steam at CES this year. The two entities have nailed down a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) outlining their plans to consolidate activity in Wi-Fi Alliance. The agreement builds on more than two years of collaboration between the organizations, in which WiGig Alliance developed the WiGig technology specifications including MAC-PHY and Protocol Adaptation Layers (PALs) and Wi-Fi Alliance initiated work to develop an interoperability certification for 60 GHz products.

"This is an exciting technology, and has been an important highlight of our certification roadmap for some time, so we are delighted to take this step," said Wi-Fi Alliance president and CEO Edgar Figueroa . "Combining the expertise of Wi-Fi Alliance and WiGig Alliance will deliver a terrific user experience with 60 GHz solutions, and will help ensure that a full range of interoperable WiGig solutions reaches the market as quickly as possible."

For no, no clear plans are being announced for how the two will work together to shape end-user products, but we suspect a lot of back-door meetings will take place at CES with OEMs in order to get wireless HD streaming into products that already support Wi-Fi.