WiGig will offer low-power, high-speed wireless

Ars Technica has published an interesting report about WiGig and how it compares with Wi-Fi wireless standards. WiGig operates on the unlicensed 60GHz spectrum and is capable of data transfer speeds up to 7Gbps over wireless. With 802.11ac Wi-Fi expected to arrive this year and also be capable of slightly faster than 1Gbps transfer speeds, it is easy to confuse WiGig and 802.11ac as competing standards.

To be clear, WiGig delivers a set of capabilities quite different from what 802.11ac has to offer. For one, WiGig is limited in that it won't be capable of penetrating walls and has a limited range of just 10 meters. However, WiGig does offer 2GHz of bandwidth per channel, transmitted by a miniscule antenna measuring just 2.5mm. It is for this reason that WiGig is far more power-efficient too, says WiGig Alliance President and Chairman Ali Sadri. Indeed, transferring data at 2Gbps using WiGig will consume only about 500 to 600 milliwatts, compared to about 3 watts required to achieve a similar data rate using 802.11ac.

Finally, WiGig was architected to serve as a protocol-agnostic transport layer. For now, USB, HDMI, DisplayPort and even PCI Express are supported over WiGig wireless. Looking forward to WiGig yet? According to Sadri, mass production and deployment of certified products "will happen in 2013."

For more:
- check out this article at Ars Technica
- check out this article at PCWorld

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