(Photo Courtesy of IBM)

IBM Research and MediaTek are working on a chipset that will transmit data wirelessly at speeds of up to 2.5 Gb/second. The proposed chipset will take advantage of the 60 GHz frequency spectrum and will top current Wi-Fi data transfers by 100 times. Wi-Fi has a maximum data transfer rate of 54 Mb/s.

In consumer oriented products, a 2.5 Gb data rate would allow the transmission of high-definition television data around a person's home without the need for wired set-top boxes.

In LAN applications, the data rate would permit 10Gb file transfers in about five seconds. By comparison, current Wi-Fi standards would transfer the same file in about 10 minutes.

IBM did not speculate when or if its chipset will move into production, but IBM did demonstrate a wireless chipset about the size of a dime in February 2006 that was capable of transmitting uncompressed HDTV signals.