Cisco Systems lined up 10 other companies on Tuesday to support its bid to promote its high speed fixed wireless Internet technology as an industry standard.

Motorola, Texas Instruments, Toshiba, Samsung, Bechtel Telecommunications, Broadcom, Pace Micro Technology, KMPG Consulting, LCC International and EDS are all promising to push Cisco's Vector Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (VOFDM) offering to try and boost the market for Internet based consumer devices and appliances.

VOFDM was created from technology Cisco acquired last year when it bought Clarity Wireless.

Steve Smith, Cisco's director of broadband wireless marketing, said: "This is the technology that allows you to get to sites you couldn't before," adding that it made two-way data, voice and video communications possible over the airwaves to both home and businesses, at speeds comparable to cable modems and DSL services.

He said the partners aimed to standardise the Media Access Control (MAC) and VOFDM layer of the product to enable different wireless offerings to interoperate. They also hoped to drive down costs associated with infrastructure deployment, Customer Premise Equipment (CPE) devices and installation.

Another objective, he added, was to make the technology available to as many companies as possible, including competitors, so that the industry would adopt it as a standard.

"It's not our desire to stop competitors from getting this technology. It's our goal to set this as the standard and get things rolling," he explained.

Compliant products are expected to ship by the end of the year.

Bob Egan, research director for mobile and wireless products at The Gartner Group, said: "The only way to really make the resources of the Internet available to everyone will be by also using wireless technologies."

By 2003, he predicted that the market for this type of wireless equipment in Canada and the US would reach USD1.5 billion, while brokerage firm CIBC World Markets estimated that the global market could be worth as much as USD4 billion by 2004.