The Wi-Fi Alliance will consolidate all of the activities and assets of the Wireless Gigabit (WiGig) Alliance under a merger agreement announced by the organizations.
The WiGig Alliance promotes short range, multi-gigabit capable wireless connectivity based on unlicensed 60 GHz spectrum. Early 60 GHz implementations based on the WiGig specifications are entering the market now and ABI Research forecasts that by 2016, annual shipments of devices with both Wi-Fi and WiGig technology will reach 1.8 billion.
The Wi-Fi Alliance and the WiGig Alliance have been collaborating for the past two years, during which time the WiGig Alliance developed the key 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.”
“We set out four years ago with the simple goal of realizing a global wireless ecosystem of interoperable, high-performance devices that would operate seamlessly. In that time there have been many challenges to overcome but we have now created a market that simply did not previously exist. Consolidating activities with the Wi-Fi Alliance at this juncture will ensure WiGig’s mainstream success to the benefit of technology users everywhere,” said Dr Ali Sadri, President and Chairman of the WiGig Alliance.
