While the WiGig Alliance sounds like it should be an organisation promoting whirligig adoption, they actually busy themselves with wireless connectivity. In fact, latest across the Wireless Gigabit Alliance’s desk is a standard that takes backward compatibility with the existing 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands used by WiFi 802.11 devices and throws in some 60GHz action for data transfer rates up to 7 Gbps.
That means significantly higher speeds than WiFi 802.11n is capable of currently, handy when you consider how many people are trying to shuffle high-definition media around their homes or back up huge quantities of data. Backward compatibility, meanwhile, means older non-WiGig compliant devices with WiFi can still hook up to the same networks. Cisco is fresh on-board, and sound pretty keen from their press release quote, so there’s a fair chance we could see super-speedy wireless debuting relatively soon.