Motorola Inc. has thrown its weight behind one of two main standard proposals being developed for 802.11n technology.
The World Wide Spectrum Efficiency consortium said it has harmonized its technical proposals with Motorola, which had developed a separate one. This will result in an enhanced package to be submitted to the IEEE Task Group N for consideration, the consortium said.
The TGn was set up to develop a next-generation Wi-Fi standard to provide data throughput over 100 megabits per second.
“Motorola’s joining with WWiSE is a strong endorsement of the fundamental technical direction adopted by WWiSE to improve spectral efficiency and improve range and robustness. Their contributions enrich the proposal in a manner consistent with these objectives,” said Jim Zyren, WWiSE spokesperson and director of marketing, wireless networking business unit, Conexant Systems Inc.
“The updated WWiSE proposal is now in a state that can be quickly adopted as the baseline draft standard for 802.11n.”
WWiSE consists of 12 companies, including Airgo Networks, Broadcom Corp., Buffalo, Conexant, ETRI, Hughes Network Systems, Ralink Technology, Realtek, STMicroelectronics, Texas Instruments, TrellisWare Technologies and Winbond Electronics.
WWiSE is competing with another proposal from TGn Sync, a 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., Nokia Corp., Samsung Electronics, Cisco Systems Inc., Nortel Networks Ltd., Sony Corp., Intel Corp. and others.
“Motorola believes the IEEE 802.11n standard is an important building block for offering connectivity to high-bandwidth services in the home and enterprise environment,” said Miguel Pellon, vice president technology standards at Motorola. “We believe our experience in making applications such as mobile VoIP and mobile multimedia streaming operate in handheld devices and our expertise in power-saving mechanisms strengthen the WWiSE proposal for 802.11n.”
The group announced some of the highlights of the new enhanced proposal, including:
- It improves on the pre-existing 20MHz Wi-Fi channel width, which is mandatory on industry players.
- It has enhanced MIMO technology that enables a maximum data rate of 135 Mbps.
- It will interoperate with and enjoy backward compatibility with existing Wi-Fi devices in the 5GHz and 2.4 GHz bands.
