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It may be possible in the not-too-distant future for Wi-Fi enabled devices to communicate wirelessly with one another without the need of a hot spot. The Wi-Fi Alliance, a non-profit organization which aims to steer the world towards the adoption of a single standard for high-speed wireless networking, said Wednesday that it hopes to release a new specification by mid-2010 that would make such device-to-device communication possible.
“Wi-Fi Direct represents a leap forward for our industry,” Alliance Executive Director Edgar Figueroa said in statement announcing the new specification. “Wi-Fi users worldwide will benefit from a single technology solution to transfer content and share applications quickly and easily among devices, even when a Wi-Fi access point isn’t available.”
The impact, said Figueroa, is that Wi-Fi will become more pervasive across the enterprise and more useful for consumers.
The Alliance said the specification can be implemented in any Wi-Fi enabled device, from laptops and netbooks, to mobile phones, cameras, printers, and interfaces such as keyboards.
Importantly, the new specification will be able to create connections to hundreds of millions of Wi-Fi enabled devices already in use. Devices that support the specification, which includes WPA2 security, will be able to discover one another and advertise available services.
The new specification opens up a wide range of possibilities. It streamlines the way people can communicate and exchange files around a small office setting and certainly should make it easier to set up connections with printers and other peripheral devices. I can also see it being used to extend social networking in a number of ways.
It wasn’t mentioned in the specification outline, but I also wonder whether it could be used to stretch your wireless reach to an Internet hot spot connection. Could you, for example, piggy-back your way to a hotspot at a nearby Starbucks by connecting through several Wi-Fi enable devices?
We’ll have to save the answer to that question for another day, but the new Wi-Fi Direct specification certainly does sound like an exciting step forward.
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