I’d never heard of Atheros Communications until running across a brief but intriguing mention in the July issue of Wired.
Atheros has apparently beaten everyone to market with the first 802.11a chip, which will go into mass production sometime this summer. Whereas 802.11b operates on the 2 ghz range, 802.11a is designed for the 5ghz range (which like 900mhz and 2 ghz doesn’t require a license) and achieves potential throughputs of up to 72Mbps, although the current IEEE standards limit the maximum potential throughput to “just” 54Mbps.
Atheros has a press release explaining the technology. Given how long it took 802.11b to begin showing up at the consumer level in volume, this will probably take 3 to 5 years to become affordable for casual users, but is nice to see where these things are headed.
There are already 802.11b cards showing up that add proprietary features to speed things like streaming DVD video over a wireless LAN. Imagine what could be done with five times that bandwidth.