The race for faster Wi-Fi

The already fierce competition between Wi-Fi chipset vendors seems to be intensifying. Recently we have seen announcements of new developments relating to the latest Wi-Fi standard (802.11 ac), with claims of up to 10 Gbps in the coming year or two.

Two factors are behind this - (a) the use of channel bonding, whereby channels (especially in the more capacious 5 Ghz band) are grouped to gain a wider path for the signals (up to 160 MHz); (b) the latest variants in multiple antenna configurations (Multi input Multi output (MIMO)).

• Channel bonding is important to the latest performance plans, including bridging capacity in 2.4 and 5 GHz bands together. It would be assisted by an extension of the 5 GHz licence exempt access rights (as proposed by WiFi forward and apparently now backed by the FCC).
• MIMO, which makes use of multiple signal paths between devices, is also a key tool in reaching the high performance claims. Broadcom has announced that it is planning 6-stream devices which could support up to 3.2 Gbps throughput, whilst a new competitor Quantenna claims that it will be able to use 8 steams (with an 8 x 8 antenna configuration) to achieve up to 10 Gbps.

Both of these vendors are targetting the home access point market, which has promising growth potential over the coming years, as ISPs ramp up the bandwidth of access networks. The ISPs will be looking to use the new access points to gain additional revenues from offering services such as data offload, for example, to mobile operators.

Source: Rethink-Wireless.com