A new battle of technologies may be in the offing in the 802.11n arena as 12 key companies have developed a key proposal to counter another one announced last week that is backed by a group of top wireless players.
The TGn Sync is a coalition of cellular, computing, consumer electronics, enterprise, public access and semiconductor markets. The other group, which goes by the moniker WWiSE, comprises mainly chip companies.
TGn Sync has Nokia Corp., Samsung Electronics and Sony Ericsson for handsets; Cisco Systems Inc. and Nortel Networks Ltd. for enterprise; Philips, Sanyo, Sony, Toshiba and Panasonic for the consumer-electronics market; and Atheros, Agere, Intel and Marvell for semiconductors.
The WWiSE group parades Airgo Networks, Bermai, Broadcom, Conexant Systems, STMicrolectronics and Texas Instruments.
The two proposals are the major submissions to be presented Sept. 13-17 at the IEEE meeting in Berlin. There are more than 40 such proposals.
TGn said its proposal is superior to its rival in speed, spectrum and power management and interoperability, adding its products proposal will not need to confront the hurdle of earlier protocols like 802.11a, b, and g in trying to adapt to the computing and consumer-electronics standards.
While both proposals want to leverage the multiple in, multiple out technology, the WWiSE group proposes a blend of MIMO and the OFDM technologies.
TGn said it will support speeds of between 243 megabits per second and more than 600 Mbps, unlike WWiSE, which will support maximum data rates of 135 Mbps on the 20 MHz band. TGn said it supports 10-, 20- and 40-megahertz channels, while WWiSE supports 40 megahertz as an option “where permissible by regulatory bodies.
“Our goal is to unify computing and consumer electronics to allow high speed and lower power consumption in phones and also o support more users in enterprise networks,” said Sheung Li, product line manager at Atheros, which belongs to the TGn Sync. Group. He explained that TGn will support products such as laptops with multiple antennas.
