Realising the high-speed wire-free dream

Can you imagine pulling up outside a petrol station and being able to instantly download an HD movie in less time than it takes to fill the car with fuel? Or at home, wirelesslyconnecting together your TV, tablet, PC and mobile phone and being able to shunt around huge amounts of data between them without long waits. A California laboratory has been testing a new technology that promises to turn these scenarios into reality. It is called Wireless Gigabit - and the Santa Clara lab recently put so-called WiGig devices through their paces to check they were interoperable. The event was very successful. Participant companies were excited about their implementation of the WiGig specifications. It is another step along the road for the high-speed wireless standard which was created in May 2009.

The standard was put through its paces at a PlugFest event in the US. It operates in the unlicensed 60GHz spectrum band, which has little interference, meaning it can offer speeds far higher than traditional wi-fi - up to 7Gbps (gigabits per second). This is a revolution in communication. It offers tools that customers never had before. It is a game-changer in wireless and in a couple of years who knows how many new applications there will be for it. That promise has helped attract several high profile backers including Intel, Microsoft, Cisco and Nokia. The speedsoffered by WiGig mean it can shift data in a way that wi-fi can only dream of. Wi-fi networks are very busy and over-crowded and cannot deal with bandwidth-heavy applications. However, there is has one major drawback. WiGig's range is limited to between 10 to 15 metres - a factor that may prevent it being crowned the next-generation wireless standard. Its much shorter range means it isn't so much a replacement for wi-fi as for cable.

Even so, the appeal of a cable-free future is obvious. People’s desire for fast data downloads has caused countless living room corners to resemble spaghetti wire junctions. As devices continue to swap more data, more often with a rising number of other products, there is a growing need for faster wireless transfers.

Interconnectivity of devices in the home will be the key to utilising the ever faster connections we can get because people want easy ways of getting HD video from their camcorder onto their TV, and also onto their tablets.

WiGig is not the only wireless standard offering high-speed data transfers between devices. Ultra-wideband is also designed to carry large amounts of bandwidth over short distances. But so far it has failed to catch on. There are no standards for it and the industry has not really adopted it. Meanwhile WiGig steams ahead. The adoption curve will be slower than for wi-fi because it will rely on a whole ecosystem, and that will take a while to put in place. At first we will see it in laptops and PCs and the peripherals that connect to them.