GigaOM » Kelly Davis-Felner

Wi-Fi Alliance gobbles up WiGig; plans to certify devices this year

Kevin Fitchard — Thu, 03 Jan 2013 15:42:20 +0000

The Wi-Fi Alliance and the WiGig Alliance have agreed to become to one, signing a memorandum of understanding to merge all of their technology and certification work under Wi-Fi’s banner. WiGig won’t go away, becoming just another flavor of Wi-Fi, but the Alliance said it plans to jointly certify Wi-Fi and WiGig devices in late 2013.

WiGig is an extremely high-speed, but short range, local networking technology that promises to link ultra-high-performance broadband appliances and peripherals with up to 6 gigabit per second connections. Its major limitation is the extremely high 60 GHz frequencies it uses, which limits its connections to near-line-of-sight within a single room. Still the technology has attracted a lot of interest from networking vendors from giants Intel, Dell and Broadcom to a spate of new startups like Wilocity and Nitero.

Wi-Fi Alliance marketing director Kelly Davis-Felner said the respective alliances have been collaborating for some time and as it became apparent that most device makers would integrate both Wi-Fi and WiGig technologies into their future products, it made sense for the two entities to merge.

“The technology behind WiGig is fairly different from Wi-Fi in terms of performance, range, and use cases, and doesn’t interoperate with traditional Wi-Fi,” Davis-Felner said via e-mail. “As such, we expect that the branding for the technology will be different from “Wi-Fi”. That said, it’s important to note that many, if not most, implementations of 60 GHz technology will likely coexist alongside traditional Wi-Fi technology.”

WiGig will coexist with the Wi-Fi Alliance’s own gigabit wireless networking initiative, 802.11ac, which will work in the 5 GHz airwaves, but it now looks like WiGig will get fully subsumed into the Alliance’s own work in the 60 GHz, based on the developing IEEE 802.11ad standard (subscription required).

Davis-Felner said the Alliance will begin its lab interoperability work this month, and it plans to begin ramping its certification program by the end of the year. WiGig isn’t the only group seeking to use the 60 GHz airwaves. Late last year Silicon Image announced plans to use the same spectrum to deliver video and gaming from handsets to televisions and other large screens inside the home using the Wireless HD standard.

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Seamless Wi-Fi on your smartphone could quickly become reality

Kevin Fitchard — Tue, 08 May 2012 17:46:04 +0000

Soon our smartphones will automatically connect to carriers’ Wi-Fi hotspots thanks to the Wi-Fi Alliance’s new Passpoint certification. Although the Wi-Fi Alliance won’t accept its first devices for certification until late June, there may not be much of a lag time before it hits consumer phones — and other devices.

Wi-Fi Alliance marketing director Kelly Davis-Felner said the Alliance isn’t expecting vendors to submit just new smartphones, tablets and access points to its labs for Passpoint certification, but also the huge body of existing devices and equipment already in the market – upgraded with new Hotspot 2.0 software. Once that old gear receives certification, vendors can push that software out to millions of access points and Wi-Fi enabled handsets.

That means unlike the usual wireless network cycles, we won’t have to wait for next-generation equipment and new gadgets to gradually make their way into the market. “There are millions of access points out there,” Davis-Felner said. “Hopefully they upgrade sooner rather than later.”

The Alliance has already pre-certified a core set of access points and handsets that will serve as a testbed against which the Alliance will compare submissions. The handsets that emerge from the Alliance’s labs will be able to seamlessly authenticate to Passpoint-compliant hotspots without futzing about with network IDs and passwords.

Don’t expect your phone to start automatically logging into every access point in sight though. Essentially Passpoint and Hotspot 2.0 will make it easy to log in to carrier-owned and-managed access points, and right now there aren’t a heck of a lot of them. AT&T has been the most aggressive deploying its own hotspots, but most of the other U.S. operators only use them for spot coverage.

But Davis-Felner said Passpoint certification may well provide the extra push for U.S. operators to get more aggressive about Wi-Fi. The big thing holding back large-scale carrier Wi-Fi adoption is the login issue. Once Hotspot 2.0 solves that problem, they will have the incentive to expand their own Wi-Fi networks and sign deals hotspot providers like Boingo or Time Warner Cable.

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The Handset of the Future Needs Wi-Fi

Stacey Higginbotham — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 03:00:59 +0000

Like me, the Wi-Fi Alliance is based in Austin, so I asked them if they wouldn’t mind setting up a home tour that would allow me to see the future of Wi-Fi in action. In the segment below, I sit down with Kelly Davis-Felner, marketing director of the Wi-Fi Alliance, whose home I visited to talk about Wi-Fi on handsets as well as the future of Wi-Fi peering, which would create device networks independent of the Internet.

Davis-Felner says the Alliance has certified 249 mobile handsets since 2003, 106 of them this year alone. She expects Wi-Fi on handsets to be more common in the years to come — a prediction that, after reading our readers’ opinions of the BlackBerry Storm shipping without Wi-Fi, I wholeheartedly agree with. And in the last two minutes of the video, Davis-Felner talks about networking WiFi-enabled devices for sharing photos, playing games or printing without ever having to access the web.

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