Startup company provides faster wireless speeds at greater distances: Airgo claims 108 Mbps at two to six times Wi-Fi's range using closely spaced multiple antennas that send and receive simultaneously, according to the article in the New York Times.
An engineer colleague wrote in to note that Airgo's technology employs lots of redundancy as part of its high-data rate operations, and that the device isn't full duplex: that is, it sends and receives on different channels at the same time not the same channel, which is virtually unworkable.
It's unclear to me how this product enters the market: the parameters are fine, but without compatibility, how does it proceed? Enterprises haven't deployed anything like the extent of wireless LANs that will be built out, but Wi-Fi is a tested, multi-vendor, reliable product with known qualities.
The CEO of Airgo expects adoption immediately, saying in a couple of places he expects they could be profitable in 2004. To believe that, he must have quite a few deals signed and ready to be announced. Ultrawideband (UWB), a technology without the range but with the speed necessarily to meet some of the same consumer-electronics goals has been under development for years and should finally appear in equipment soon -- by Christmas 2004.
Great for connecting two semi-distant networks together or for extending the range of a single computer
I recently wrote about Airgo in a column that addresses some of the compatibility issues and the company's response to UWB. The article is at http://wireless.ziffdavis.com/article2/0,3973,1227039,00.asp
Ross