NETGEAR today announced their new line of MIMO G wireless products based on True MIMO chipset from MIMO G Wireless Router (Model WGM124) and PC Card (Model WGM511) claim up to 8x the speed and coverage of standard 802.11g devices.
With True MIMO, NETGEAR says it can run advanced applications such as streaming multimedia content while delivering speeds of up to 108Mbps and has also been shown to improve the performance of standard 802.11b and 802.11g clients.
The NETGEAR MIMO G Wireless Router (WGM124) and MIMO G Wireless PC Card (WGM511) are fully compatible with 802.11b and 802.11g wireless networks and are Wi-Fi compliant. The router has three MIMO antennas offering improved speeds and range. It comes with NETGEAR’s Smart Wizard for easy set-up with the automatic detection and connection to an Internet service provider.
It offers complete security using a double firewall with Network Address Translation (NAT) and Stateful Packet Inspection (SPI), along with Wireless Encryption Protocol (WEP) 64, 128 -bit encryption and Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA, Pre-Shared Key). In addition, the router offers Privacy Control and Management features such as URL content filtering.
The NETGEAR MIMO G Wireless Router (WGM124) and MIMO G Wireless PC Card (WGM511) are available in Japan this month. Availability in the United States and costs were not immediately available. NETGEAR is also offering the Airgo based MIMO products in the United States.
Tim Higgins says today’s announcement begs the question of whether NETGEAR is pursuing a dual MIMO product strategy or has made an about-face from the RangeMax pitch the company gave at CES, which touted technology from startup Video54.
According to Tim Higgins, an initial response from a NETGEAR spokesperson said that RangeMax product will be available in March, as announced, and that an official statement would be available soon.
Airgo’s MIMO chipset is based on the WWiSE “standard”, and is used in Belkin’s “pre N” wireless router and the Linksys Wireless-G Router with SRX. Atheros has announced a MIMO chipset, the AR5005VL that is taking the TGn Sync route to an 802.11n “standard”.
TGn Sync is comprised of 20 industry-leading companies across the cellular, computing, consumer electronics, enterprise networking, mobile radio, public access and semiconductor markets.
The TGn version would use two MIMO antennas, in combination with 40 MHz channels, to create a device that will provide 250 Mbit/s of bandwidth and a theoretical 175 Mbit/s of usable throughput. They claim that “beamforming” TGn has cost and power advantages, important in portable gear.
Members of the WWiSE coalition suggest this would reduce the number of available non-overlapping 802.11 channels and be illegal in some countries, for instance, Japan. Instead, it has proposed technology that uses four MIMO antennas, while sticking with the 20 MHz channels currently specified by 802.11.
DailyWireless has more on recent MIMO WiFi systems.
