The standard spans in-building and metropolitan applications. Nokia, L.M. Ericsson, Bosch, Texas Instruments Inc., Dell Computer and Telia are among the founding members of the alliance, which will try to extend the European HiperLAN 1 to global support, even as it extends its bit rates and bandwidths from the original in-building HiperLAN.

Kickoffs are scheduled at both NetWorld+Interop here and at a separate London event.

It may be no accident that the founding members have significant overlap with the inventors of the short-range, 1-Mbit/second wireless Bluetooth interest group, said Michael Bolle, president of DSP semiconductor company Systemonic GmbH, which is working on an orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing chip for HiperLAN 2. As PC OEMs and Internet appliance device vendors discover that Bluetooth is more appropriate for a personal or desktop area network, they are driven to find compatible in-building standards to use for higher bit-rate applications.

HiperLAN 2 is a two-tiered standard, based on a time-division multiple access/time-division duplex protocol. Its in-building component operates at 5 GHz and the second generation of the standard operates at 25 Mbits/s. A metropolitan-area extension of the standard also could reach speeds of 25 Mbits/s. A third future leg of the program would look at ATM OC-3 (155 Mbits/s) wireless links over short distances.

In January, the IEEE's 802.11 working group on wireless LANs, which has spurred a new 802.11a subsection for a 5-GHz LAN scaling from 6 to 54 Mbits/s, sought to standardize its work with the HiperLAN 2 group . However, 802.11 uses a connectionless Ethernet-like protocol with collision-sensing, while HiperLAN 2 is based on connection-oriented links, though it can accept Ethernet frames.

Forum members are not speaking for the record, but one participant observed on background that the standard could hold a lot of promise for consumer devices requiring bit rates to support multimedia applications over wireless links, in a single standard that could span in-building applications, campus areas and small metro regions. Two forum members, TI and Bosch, have participated in developing Local Multipoint Distribution Service hardware, though that business has since been sold to Cisco. Since LMDS is a licensed cellular-like service at 28 GHz, it is not clear whether any of the work could be applied to HiperLAN 2 networking.