No, it isn’t the crazy rockstar cousin of the Nintendo Wii: WiGig is a wireless communications standard (802.11ad) created by the Wireless Gigabit Alliance, a consortium of hardware and software companies that want to make use of the unlicensed 60GHz frequency range. Beyond offering speeds of up to 7 gigabits per second — the fastest 802.11n networks, operating in the 5GHz band, only achieve a few hundred megabits — WiGig will also unify data, display, and audio networks, and eventually offer the direct extension of USB and PCIe data buses. The first WiGig devices are expected to arrive in the first half of 2012.

The reason WiGig is capable of such high data rates is the breadth of frequencies that it can use: in the 60GHz range, there is around 7GHz of free spectrum — compared to just 83.5MHz of free space in the unlicensed 2.4GHz range that most Wi-Fi networks use. As you can imagine, if engineers can squeeze hundreds of megabits out of the 2.4GHz and 5GHz ranges, 60GHz and its huge swathe of available spectrum is an exciting prospect indeed — and in fact, 7Gbps is actually quite slow, given the amount of free space.

There’s a good reason that the 60GHz range hasn’t been commercially used until WiGig, however: extremely high frequency transmissions are incredibly fragile. The lower the frequency, the better it can bend around hills and penetrate walls — which is why TV signals are in the 100MHz range — but vice-versa, the higher the frequency, the less enduring and tenacious the signal becomes. To overcome this, 60GHz transmissions have to be highly targeted and generally require line of sight. Neither of these requirements are particularly amenable to home networking, however, which is why WiGig uses a rather fancy technology called beamforming. Beamforming doesn’t remove the line-of-sight requirement, but it does mean that distances of more than 10 meters are possible.

Basically, a WiGig device will operate in all three 802.11 frequency ranges: 2.4GHz, 5GHz, and 60GHz. WiGig devices will use the lower frequencies to negotiate several beamformed 2.1GHz channels in the 60GHz range — and if the signal is broken, the network will fall back to a Wi-Fi network on the lower frequencies; as a corollary, this fall back method will also mean that WiGig routers will be fully backwards compatible with existing 802.11 Wi-Fi devices, which is handy. The WiGig Alliance hasn’t said how long the 60GHz negotiation will take, however, and we don’t know whether you’ll be able to move around without breaking the high-speed link.

Finally, a word about the exciting possibility of a unified data and audiovisual network: WiGig, with the help of “protocol adaption layers” (PAL) will allow the concurrent transmission of data and A/V signals. These PALs will operate at the MAC and Physical Layer, below the IP data layer, allowing wireless interfaces of HDMI and DisplayPort to be implemented, along with relevant DRM technologies like HDCP. These PALs can also be extended to USB and PCIe, meaning a WiGig TV might be able to communicate directly with the system bus of a WiGig home theater PC — or perhaps directly with an external USB hard drive caddy. A total throughput of 7Gbps is unlikely to be enough once you start transmitting Blu-ray streams through the air, though (and indeed, there’s a competing WirelessHD standard that promises speeds up to 25Gbps!)

There’s a lot more to the WiGig spec than what we’ve covered here, so be sure to read the specification whitepaper [PDF] — it’s even human readable!

Read more at Ars Technica