The group behind a new wireless technology – WiGig – that aims to connect consumer devices at up to 7GB/s hopes to see commercial availability in early 2013 and also believes that mobile operators could integrate it into their small-cell deployments.
 
Dr Ali Sadri, Chairman and President of the WiGig Alliance, revealed these ambitions in a new interview with Mobile World Live. Founded in 2009, the alliance has the support of such major vendors as Broadcom, Cisco, Huawei, Intel, Microsoft, Nokia and Samsung and is intended to develop a specification for 60GHz wireless technologies that will provide multi-gigabit wireless connectivity among PCs, consumer electronics and handheld devices. “We’ve done our first plugfest in October last year, we’re scheduled to do a test event in June, and hopefully certification in early 2013,” said Sadri.  
 
In the interview, Sadri explains why the technology will complement and improve existing wireless LAN capabilities: “We are beyond what WiFi can do today, and our technology is backwards compatible with WiFi… What differentiates WiGig from WiFi is all the non-IP applications we have built in; HDMI cable replacement, SDIO cable replacement, DisplayPort cable replacement, USB cable replacement. These are all additional to the standard usability of WiFi.”
 
And Sadri also claims the technology could move  out of the home and office and into mobile operator small-cell deployments: “One of the areas we are looking at is can we use existing architecture and take it to adjacent markets… small cells will be in every street but somehow we need to bring high throughput connectivity to these small cells… One of the things we are looking at is how can we extend the WiGig technology MAC and PHY to be used for short-range backhaul. One of the best things to do for the short-range backhaul is to operate in the 60GHz band.”
 
Watch the full interview here.