WiGig Alliance seeks to bring super-fast wireless video transfer to homes

May 6, 2009 | Dean Takahashi | Comments | |

Wireless video is starting to get off the ground, but a new industry alliance with the power of heavyweights behind it will give it more momentum.

The WiGig Alliance will use the unlicensed 60-gigahertz band of the wireless spectrum to transfer high-definition video within the room of a home at a speed of six gigabits a second, which is much faster and more reliable than Wi-Fi. It’s similar to SiBEAM’s existing technology but seeks to enhance that by combining it with traditional Wi-Fi networking that extends the range at slower speeds to go through walls and cover the entire home. So the network could offer multiple speeds, depending on range and need.

One of the big benefits will be getting rid of the spaghetti-noodle wiring behind almost every TV set today as consumers try to connect more and more devices to their displays and networks.

There are 15 big technology firms behind the WiGig effort, including TV makers like Samsung that have also supported competing standards from Amimon (Wi-Fi-based WHDI) and SiBEAM (60-ghz-based Wireless HD). Those alliances have gotten support in part because TV makers are betting on multiple technologies now.

With WiGig, you could turn on a Blu-ray player and beam it without wiring to a TV set. Or you could connect to the Internet in another part of the house using the wireless connection in the living room. Multiple devices could use the network at the same time, since it’s about 10 or 20 times faster than many Wi-Fi networks.

The WiGig Alliance includes Atheros Communications, MediaTek, NEC, Panasonic, Samsung, Wilocity, Microsoft, LG, Dell, Marvell, Nokia, NEC, Intel and Broadcom. The specification will be ready in the fourth quarter of the year, meaning it’s likely that the technology will ship in real products sometime next year.

Sony isn’t on board yet, but the group is working on getting more members to sign up, said Ali Sadri, president and chairman of the Wireless Gigabit Alliance.

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About the Author, Dean Takahashi

Dean is lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat. He covers video games, security, chips and a variety of other subjects. Dean previously worked at the San Jose Mercury News, the Wall Street Journal, the Red Herring, the Los Angeles Times, the Orange County Register and the Dallas Times Herald. He is the author of two books, Opening the Xbox and the Xbox 360 Uncloaked. Follow him on Twitter at @deantak, and follow VentureBeat on Twitter at @venturebeat.

  • 60-GHz wireless is certainly an interesting technology. The fact that it uses the specific frequency in which oxygen absorption is the highest limits signal propagation to only a few feet and keeps the signal in the same room, so it will work great for same-room video streaming. By design, it cannot be used for multi-room communication, so other solutions are required for applications that require room-to-room video streaming, such as IPTV distribution or PC-to-TV video streaming.

    For multi-room applications, the most interesting standard is G.hn, developed by ITU, which promises data rates up to 1 Gbit/s [see http://blog.ds2.es/ds2blog/2009/04/how-fast.html ], and can operate over any existing home wire (power lines, phone lines or coaxial cables).