Wi-Fi Alliance partner named as test lab for Wi-Fi Aware

21st July 2015

CETECOM GmbH

Mick Elliott

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The Wi-Fi Alliance has launched the Wi-Fi CERTIFIED Wi-Fi Aware certification program, offering an exciting new capability of Wi-Fi which enables power-efficient discovery of nearby devices, applications, and information before making a Wi-Fi connection. Wi-Fi Aware is designed to work well in crowded environments and indoors, and to minimise power consumption. The “neighbour awareness” technology behind Wi-Fi Aware operates continuously in the background, sending clusters of very small ping messages rather than broadcasting all the time.

The value of Wi-Fi Aware comes alive in social, local and mobile applications. Wi-Fi Aware-certified devices will discover before connecting, further improving Wi-Fi’s convenience for social applications such as gaming, peer-to-peer messaging, and media sharing, as well as location-specific services such as proximity assessment, contextual notifications, and offers.

Application discovery using Wi-Fi Aware does not require connection to a Wi-Fi Network which opens the door to many new device-to-device interactions. The feature has to be built into an app to work, which will leverage the technology in Wi-Fi Aware-certified devices.

With the certification process all set, this technology will be available in smartphones and tablets from next year.

“Users want to use Wi-Fi as much as possible for social and local applications, and Wi-Fi Aware is an exciting breakthrough that makes it easier to know what interesting services are nearby before making a connection. The Aware program has broad vendor support, which is a sign that things will happen quickly" explained Edgar Figueroa, president and CEO of Wi-Fi Alliance.

"As a specialist for wireless communication technologies and a long-time partner of the Wi-Fi Alliance we are proud to be the first and only European lab which has been qualified to perform certification testing for the new Wi-Fi Aware program. Knowing that the mobile landscape is changing quickly and the market for proximity-based, social networking applications is expected to grow significantly in the near future, we do not doubt that Wi-Fi Aware will rapidly set new standards in mobile devices. For CETECOM it is an exciting challenge to count among the few worldwide labs which have been approved to help ensure that manufacturers can quickly achieve the certification to bring Wi-Fi Aware enabled devices to the market" stated Wilfried Klassmann, CEO of CETECOM.