WiFi Direct Is A Brilliant Idea and It Has Been Long Overdue

Watch out Bluetooth, here comes WiFi. That has been the general mood all over the tech blogosphere ever since the WiFi Alliance announced the new WiFi Direct Ad Hoc networking solution. What it essentially does is make Bluetooth all but obsolete by allowing you to use it exactly the way you use Bluetooth – but with all the benefits of normal Bluetooth.

Ad Hoc networking is meant for those times when you just need to establish a temporary connection to transfer files between two devices. As you can already guess from that description, Bluetooth pretty much owns that market. But now, things are about to change. The WiFi Alliance, the body that develops and maintains the WiFi technology has announced its own solution to this problem and that is what is called WiFi Direct.

The current solutions for Ad Hoc technology max out at 11Mbps, which is simply not acceptable. That is why we need something like the WiFi Direct. It will carry all the benefits of ad hoc networking and WiFi. So for one thing, it will be able to transfer files at the rate of 250Mbps. Also, it will be able to work over a longer range, so you will not have to be within the short range that you currently have to.

As the executive director of the WiFi Alliance puts it, ad hoc networking has so far been far more complicated and hassling than what it actually is worth to consumers. So this new move betters the existing solution by a wide margin.

Other than the obvious advantages like faster speed and longer range, there is another aspect to this. This aspect will especially interest handheld device manufacturers who are already cramming as much as possible into devices.

Once WiFi Direct becomes easily operable and a recognized standard, manufacturers can finally drop Bluetooth altogether. Since most of the advanced phones are carrying WiFi anyway, it might make sense to save the space usually reserved for Bluetooth for something else. Saving even half a square inch of space means a lot of to those who design and build tiny handheld devices like modern smart phones. So this might actually have a pleasant side effect in the form of better phones in the future.

At the present moment, the devices that have WiFi on them need a third device in order to connect with other WiFi enabled devices in the vicinity. So unless you are near a WLAN hotspot, you are not getting anywhere near connecting to another device even if you place both of them side by side. The problem is with how the protocol was designed.

Also, another positive aspect of one-to-one or a kind of peer-to-peer connection over WiFi would be the WPA2 encryption that the data stream would be made to go through. Even though Bluetooth has the device pairing in place for that, this will be a better, more secure way of connecting.

However, there has been no word on the technology shipping with devices anytime soon. Even though this has huge potential, a lot of testing and debugging will have to be done before this technology is let out into the wild where consumers will use it without thinking twice. For it to be taken for granted like Bluetooth, it has to be easy to use, reliable and secure all at the same time. The current schedule is for releasing the WiFi-Direct specifications in mid-2010. If that goes according to plan, we can expect to see WiFi-Direct toting devices in 2011.