Yet Another Next-Gen Wi-Fi Standard Emerges

Claiming their intention is to speed adoption of the next-generation Wi-Fi standard that has been mired in the standard-setting process, a coalition of chipmakers and other Wi-Fi-related vendors Monday released a new specification.

The group, dubbed the Enhanced Wireless Consortium, says that its proposed 802.11n standard will support data speeds as high as 600 Mbps and would allow pre-standard products based on it to be easily upgraded to the standard when it is ratified. Members of the group include chipmakiers Atheros, Broadcom and Intel, as well as device vendors D-Link, Linksys, Netgear USRobotics and Symbol Technologies.

Noticeably missing from the group is Airgo, which has successfully marketed chipsets based on its multiple-input, multiple output (MIMO) technology. Some flavor of MIMO technology is at the core of all the proposed 802.11n specifications.

Some of the members of the new consortium include WLAN equipment vendors using Airgo's chipsets, including Linksys, which is owned by Cisco. Besides using MIMO to support speeds as high as 600 Mbps, the group claims its specification can use both the 2.4 GHz and the 5GHz bands and support for both 20 MHz and 40 Mhz channels.