More than two dozen leading manufacturers of wireless LAN equipment including Apple have formed an industry coalition aimed at breaking a deadlock in efforts to establish a new, faster Wi-Fi standard.
The Enhanced Wireless Consortium (EWC), announced Monday, hopes to speed ratification of an IEEE 802.11n standard by introducing its own specification with widespread industry support. The industry coalition consists of 27 companies, including Atheros Communications Inc., Broadcom Corp., Cisco Systems Inc. and Intel Corp.
“These members represent a good cross-section of the two groups that were unable to agree to an 80.11n standard as part of the IEEE standardization process,” said Gwen Carlson, a spokeswoman at Conexant Systems Inc, which is an EWC member.
For the past several months, the two camps had argued bitterly over a standard, failing to achieve the majority support required by IEEE.
In the one camp was the World-Side Spectrum Efficiency (WWiSE) group, and in the other was TGnSync.
The members will continue to work within the IEEE Task Group “N” in an effort to agree on an 802.11n standard, according to Carlson.
The EWC specification will benefit users by, among other things, ensuring interoperability of next-generation wireless producers across a range of brands and platforms, such as PCs, handheld devices and networking systems, Carlson said.
The planned 802.11n standard will significantly boost throughput on Wi-Fi systems. The EWC specification aims to support speeds of up to 600Mbps. That compares to today’s 802.11a and 802.11g throughput of 20Mbps to 24Mbps.
The EWC specification includes a number of other technical elements, including mixed-mode interoperability with 802.11a, b and g networks, use of 2.4GHz and/or 5GHz unlicensed bands (thus matching the frequency plan of existing 802.11 devices), 20MHz and/or 40MHz channel support and spatial multiplexing modes for simultaneous transmission using one to four antennas.
The specification will also support 4 x 4 MIMO (multiple-input/multiple-output) technology, according to Carlson.
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