While WiMAX is enjoying the media spotlight fuelled by the backing of big players like Intel, Motorola and Clearwire, the Wi-Fi industry is quietly evolving its standard to make 802.11 technology carrier- and Enterprise-grade. Carriers and MSOs are evaluating Wi-Fi and WiMAX for video distribution inside the home and in the last mile. New Wi-Fi standards are evolving to enable sophisticated sleep mode operation for handsets making them as power-efficient as cell phones. The emerging mesh networking standard is positioning Wi-Fi to compete with WiMAX and 3G cellular technologies for municipal coverage. WiMAX and Wi-Fi are being evaluated and deployed by fire and police departments for video monitoring, emergency response and e911 applications. In short, Wi-Fi and WiMAX are playing an increasingly significant role in the multi-billion dollar wireless data communications market previously dominated by cellular technologies.

This workshop will focus on the Wi-Fi and WiMAX standards and on how these standards are evolving to support voice and video applications. We will cover the activities of the IEEE and look at how the Wi-Fi Alliance and the WiMAX Forum work to certify products to ensure successful deployment of these wireless technologies. We will discuss the relationship of the IEEE standards to the 3GPP cellular standards and will attempt to navigate the sea of wireless acronyms.

To put all the standards material into context, we will have presentations by active IEEE participants.

Wednesday, September 5, 2007