CES: Wi-Fi Direct gains momentum, consumer acceptance

LAS VEGAS – Support for Wi-Fi Direct, the Wi-Fi Alliance’s new initiative to connect consumer-electronic devices directly to one another without use of an access point, has been growing – both from device makers and consumers. After the completion of a specification at the end of the year, the Wi-Fi Alliance is on track to launch its Wi-Fi Direct certification program and introduce a slew of capable devices by mid-year, according to executive director Edgar Figueroa.

Figueroa said the consortium has already seen peripherals including keyboards and mice demonstrated over Wi-Fi Direct, as well as display devices and traditional laptops. He anticipates a broader range of entertainment and productivity devices to come to market when the program begins this year.

“When we come out with a new protocol, there are early products that incorporate it, then an inflection with fast adoption until the technology becomes mature,” he said. “Many products will be able to be updated through simple software update to support [Wi-Fi Direct]. That could mean that overnight we have an awful lot of products that support it because there’s no hardware required.”

According to a consumer poll released today by the Wi-Fi Alliance, there is significant interest amongst consumers to use a service like Wi-Fi Direct amongst a host of CE devices. The survey found that 74% of consumers are interested in Wi-Fi-enabled speakers to play music throughout a home, and 74% said they would also like to use the technology to watch movies or TV on any screen in the home. Further, 71% would like to wirelessly connect quickly and directly to a printer without having to join a network, and 54% wanted to use Wi-Fi to synch portable audio players to their music library without a cable or docking station.

When asked specifically about Wi-Fi Direct, 79% of respondents indicated interest in having it incorporated into new devices – as long as setup was easy. Nearly half estimated it would take them more than 30 minutes to display digital photos on a TV screen today, but 68% were interested in doing so with the push of a button.

Figueroa stressed that setup of Wi-Fi Direct devices is as simple as touching two devices together if they are near-field communications capable or pushing a simple key, an important factor if the service is to be successful. When compared to other networking standards, he also noted that as a standard based on the IP protocol, Wi-Fi supports the standard networking protocol that exists today, it includes government-grade WPA2 security and can cover a service area that spans the entire home. It also has the ability to prioritize time-sensitive traffic to ensure quality of service and use dynamic frequency selection protocols, so that if one frequency band is congested, the device can just move to another one instantaneously.

“The more you delve into Wi-Fi protocol, the more you appreciate the 10 years of innovation that have gone behind what Wi-Fi is today,” Figueroa said, adding that the number of CE devices to become Wi-Fi certified in 2009 increased by 129% compared to 2008. “Our approach has been that we continue to build on what we’ve done before and, for that reason, there have been really countless engineering hours. For the last 10 years, we’ve been getting this right.”