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Intel Cuts Cord On Its Current Cord-Cutting WiGig Products (zdnet.com)
An anonymous reader shares a ZDNet report, which also has some clarification from Intel: It looks like you can add WiGig wireless docking to Intel's dustbin (along with IoT products axed earlier this summer), as the company has discontinued existing products using the 802.11ad wireless standard, according to Anandtech. [Since publishing this report, we've received a statement from Intel clarifying its WiGig support: "We continue to offer current versions of our 802.11ad products, such as the Intel Tri-band Wireless AC 18265 and Gigabit Wireless 10101R antenna module. We remain committed to WiGig and think it has exciting potential for a number of applications, including enabling VR to become wireless, mesh networking and as part of Intel's leading products for 5G."] WiGig was developed several years ago with faster speeds than then-current Wi-Fi standards, but because it relied on the 60GHz channel, its high throughput could only travel over short distances. As a result, it eventually became marketed as a feature for wireless laptop docking stations, and while it received some support from enterprise laptop manufactures like Dell and Lenovo, the technology didn't make a big dent against standard wired laptop docks.
As a result, it eventually became marketed as a feature for wireless laptop docking stations, and while it received some support from enterprise laptop manufactures like Dell and Lenovo, the technology didn't make a big dent against standard wired laptop docks.
I can't help but chuckle whenever I see "support" and "Lenovo" in the same sentence.
The concept had its uses(though, without some wireless charging arrangement, the utility of a 'dock' that made your laptop battery drain a bit faster(because running that multi-Gb wireless link isn't free) was always a bit troublesome.
For the things that already have reasonably sane and standardized 'over-IP' or bluetooth flavors; a wireless dock doesn't make a whole lot of sense because 'no dock' is pretty close to a wireless dock: you just dump your laptop on your desk, wifi connection handles network, file shares, printers; bluetooth peripherals reconnect in pretty short order when you come into range and you are 'docked'.
The Intel 60GHz thing(it was a pair of SKUs, one card for adding support to the client system, plus the W13100 "Wireless Gigabity Sink" part designed to build a docking station around) was aimed mostly at shoving the interfaces without good wireless abstractions over a wireless link: video(yes, 'airplay', 'miricast', etc. can do an OK job of 'wireless display' by sending an H.264 stream to a device that expects it; but they don't work with dumb monitors; and don't tend to work with software that isn't explicitly expecting them; so they aren't really an option for the "dump laptop in dock, receive dual monitors" use case) USB(there are various vendor specific hacks; but unless the USB device can be shared out at a higher level, like a printer or a mass storage device, there isn't really network-transparent USB support; the USB network extenders that do exist can be pretty dodgy and generally require fiddly drivers) and ethernet(probably the least useful for end users; since wifi is a direct substitute; but when IT wants to PXE boot...)
Even so, the niche was pretty limited, when you could get the same features, plus charging, for less money(and without a fan in your docking station; most models had a nice noisy 60mm, users loved that) in exchange for going to slightly more effort and mechanically docking. Plus, while fast, the WiGig link wasn't fast enough for fully transparent transport of things like video; and range was severely compromised if line of sight wasn't available. Plus, there were some very unpleasant Gen1 quirks and power management bugs, depending on the model.
Not really a surprise that it didn't do so well. It did offer capabilities that other things didn't(and still don't); but wired docks were doing all of that better and cheaper, with charging; and since the arrangement relied on the 60GHz radio(I'm not sure if falling back to the more usual wifi bands just wasn't implemented, or didn't offer nearly enough bandwidth to handle things like dock video without egregious compression; either way it wasn't an option); you had to be pretty close to the docking station for it to work, so the extra effort of mechanical docking was limited.
If it had gained broader acceptance; it probably could have been a winning 'enterprise' equivalent of miricast/airplay for conference room video and the like; but since those work with mostly cheap and common hardware at the expense of some relatively minor H.264 artifacts, they are a hard target for an expensive, model specific, fancy interconnect to compete with. For docking; things were bad enough with the various proprietary(but mostly functional) docks sold with 'business' laptops since forever; and they are worse now that TB3 and USB-C allow you to get full dock bandwidth out of a single connector.