Posted by Chad Weaver on Thu, May 13, 2010
Wireless speeds exceeding what the current gigabit wired networks offer, surely you must be joking. I'm not joking, and don't call me Shirley - had to throw that old joke in there. This is big news for people like me, who work at
IT support companies! It seems there are two teams working on using the 60 GHz spectrum. The newest announcement came this week as the WiGig (Wireless Gigabit Alliance) joined with the WiFi Alliance. WiGig is working on a multi-gigabit, based on this announcement they are claiming 7 gigabits per second. This is more than ten times the current wireless speeds.
There are some short comings to this technology, because the high frequency is well beyond the 2.4 GHz of 802.11g and ‘n' wireless, which means this will have to be almost if not explicitly line of sight. The higher frequency will be less able to penetrate any substances and or walls. The good news is this would be a perfect technology for high definition video to be streamed to multiple devices, including handhelds in your living room. And it also could mean the transfer of multi-gigabyte files in almost no time between computers and storage devices.
There is also a competing standard designed for only the transfer of HD video over this same spectrum. But with the joining of these two alliances, and companies such as Cisco and Linksys, and even Apple considering the adoption of this standard, we'll probably see the WiGig's standard become dominant. Because they are allied with the WiFi alliance, all devices that will use the new standard will also be backwards compatible to the older standards of ‘n' and ‘g'. I am looking forward to new technology like this as we move further and further away from wired networks. I don't know what this will mean for all of us in the IT support solutions world yet as we are usually more concerned with security then with all the new-fangled gadgets, but this kind of progress is always exciting.
For more on IT optimization and IT solutions, contact your Philadelphia IT Support, Trigon Technology, at 1-888-494-Trigon or by email at solutions@TrigonIT.com