The IEEE working group that is putting the finishing touches on the 802.11n 100Mbps wireless LAN standard is about to launch a new project, for a 1Gbps WLAN standard.

That would mean gigabit Wi-Fi.

Last year, group members formed the Very High Throughput (VHT)  Study Group to explore changes to the 802.11 WLAN standard to support gigabit capacity. The study group is looking at doing so in two frequency bands, high-frequency 60GHz for relatively short ranges and under-6GHz for ranges similar to that of today’s WLANs in the 5GHz band, 802.11a and 11n. (See the 2008 wireless companies to watch)

At a meeting this week in Hawaii, the study group has been finalizing a proposal calling for creation of a new, as yet unnamed task group to carry forward the work of crafting a standard. That proposal must be accepted by the 802.11 Working Group, which oversees the entire WLAN standard.

“The basic idea right now, and that’s subject to change, is that the ‘maximum mandatory mode’ on a single link would be [at least] 500Mbps,” says Tushar Moorti, director of systems architecture for chip maker Broadcom’s WLAN Business Unit. “But the further requirement is that [an access point] device that supports VHT would be able to sustain multiple links, so the aggregate would be over 1Gbps.”

Currently, WLAN products based on the draft 2 802.11n standard typically are providing throughput of 130M to 150Mbps, sometimes as much as 170Mbps. (Compare enterprise WLAN products.)

“I think we’ll see a [VHT] standard in two years, and WLAN products with more than 1 gigabit per second within three years,” says Craig Mathias, principal for wireless consultancy Farpoint Group. “That is absolutely phenomenal.”

That may be optimistic. One version of the IEEE proposal suggests a completion target date of 2012-13 for the standard. But a lot of big players have been active in the study group so far: Atheros, Broadcom, Intel, Marvell, Motorola and Nortel.

“It’s the next-generation technology for wireless LAN, in the same sense that 11n was the follow-on to 11a/b/g,” says Broadcom’s Moorti.

According to the proposal, VHT “will allow a corporate or home user to roam from high-throughput dense cells to wider area networks in a seamless manner, while maintaining full support for the installed base security, management, diagnostics and backbone infrastructure.” VHT will also be backward compatible with the full range of existing and emerging 802.11 standards, such as 11i for security, and 11s for mesh networking.