Wi-Fi WIRELESS LANS CONTINUE TO GROW AT AN AMAZING PACE
232 Wi-Fi-Certified Products Are Available From Over 60 Companies

Mountain View, CA, January 7, 2002— The Wireless Ethernet Compatibility Alliance (WECA) announced today that 232 Wi-Fi product certifications have been awarded to 61 WECA member companies’ products since March of 2000. This continued growth in certifications indicates that Wi-Fi is the world’s dominant wireless LAN technology.

"There is no secret formula behind Wi-Fi’s success. It’s involved a lot of hard work by a lot of people," said WECA chairman Dennis Eaton. "We started out with an open standard that many companies from around the world helped to develop. That certainly took some time, but it built a tremendous amount of consensus and commitment from these companies towards developing products. What has really made the difference, however, is the integrity and value of the Wi-Fi interoperability certification process. Products from different vendors work together and that makes them a safe buy for technology consumers. Ultimately, that’s what it’s all about," continued Eaton.

"Not only do we have broad commitment to Wi-Fi from over 60 companies producing Wi-Fi-certified gear, but over a dozen companies have six or more Wi-Fi-certified products and one company has 17 Wi-Fi-certified products. We are also seeing an expansion in the types of devices certified; from the original PC Card and access point to now include mPCI-embedded devices, USB clients and Wi-Fi wireless LAN print servers," Eaton added.

Products awarded the Wi-Fi logo have undergone strict, rigorous and independent testing at Agilent’s Interoperability Certification Labs (ICL). Testing usually takes two to four days per product to complete. ICL has built a reputation for providing objective, high-quality performance, interoperability and functional testing services.

Click here to view the complete listing of Wi-Fi-certified products.

See Wi-Fi at CES

Wi-Fi wireless LANs will be on display at CES (Booth 11710), January 8-11, in Las Vegas, Nevada.

About the Wireless Ethernet Compatibility Alliance

The Wireless Ethernet Compatibility Alliance (WECA) is a nonprofit organization formed in 1999 to certify interoperability of Wi-Fi (IEEE 802.11b) and Wi-Fi5 (IEEE 802.11a) products and to promote them as the global, wireless LAN standards across all market segments.

WECA has instituted a test suite that defines how member products are tested to certify that they are interoperable with other Wi-Fi or Wi-Fi5-certified products. These tests are conducted at an independent laboratory.

Membership in WECA is open to all companies that support the Wi-Fi and Wi-Fi5 standards. WECA now comprises 140 members that offer over 230 Wi-Fi-certified products from the world’s leading companies.

For more information, please visit www.wi-fi.org.