DALLAS-The World Wide Spectrum Efficiency (WWiSE) consortium, one of two competing groups offering a proposal to IEEE for 802.11n technology, gained another heavy hitter Friday as Nokia Corp. switched its support to the group.
Motorola Inc. joined the WWiSE group last month.
Nokia previously had been part of the TGn Sync coalition of cellular, computing, consumer electronics, public access and semiconductor companies, in the quest for a technology standard sanctioned by IEEE. TGn Sync includes Qualcomm Inc., Samsung Electronics, Cisco Systems Inc., Nortel Networks Ltd., Sony Corp., Intel Corp. and others.
“Nokia believes the IEEE 802.11n standard will become an important interface for offering increased connectivity from handheld devices to high bandwidth services in the home, hot spots and in enterprise environments,” said Steven Gray, vice president and head of Nokia Research Center USA. “We believe our expertise in power efficient air interface design, rich history with Wi-Fi, VoIP and other enabling technologies will further strengthen the WWiSE proposal and speed the time to market for 802.11n-capable handheld devices.”
The two groups will do battle next week in Atlanta when a vote will be taken. For a proposal to be adopted, the winning protocol must garner at least 75 percent of the votes. But no proposal has enough of a following to muster 75 percent even with the addition of Nokia and Motorola to the WWiSE group, industry insiders have said.
WWiSE now consists of 13 companies.
