Think your 802.11ac Wi-Fi is fast? Think again: Quantenna Communications has announced that it’s working on a chipset due 2015 that will supports speeds of up to a staggering 10Gbps.
Most current high-speed wireless chipsets send and receive three data streams at once, and are referred to as 3×3 MIMO chipsets (that last bit just stands for multiple input/multiple output). That allows manufacturers to provide speeds of up to 1.3Gbps on a 5GHz frequency band, and Asus is even managing to push that to 1.7Gbps.
But Quantenna is working on an 8×8 MIMO chipset that will provide some face-melting Wi-Fi speeds. PC World explains how it will works:
It’s based on MU-MIMO technology (multi-user MIMO). MIMO technology sends and receives data streams using multiple antennas on one transmitter and multiple antennas on one receiver. Multi-user MIMO can transmit to a number of devices at once, leveraging the antennas on a host of independent access points. The chipset will also deliver adaptive beam forming, in which the transmitter and receiver analyse the signals they exchange in order to ascertain the optimal path and to reject spurious signals.
The upshot for us humble end users: 10 Gbps of Wi-Fi goodness that is backward compatible with 802.11ac and all the older 802.11a/b/g and n standards too.
Quantenna reckons the chipset will first appear in enterprise and consumer networking, as well as in ISP infrastructure. But some bad news: it isn’t panning to turn it into a chipset for mobile devices or USB Wi-Fi adaptors. So, at best, it might make it to your laptop and desktop computers — until someone else picks up the baton, at least. [PC World]
Picture: when i was a bird/Flickr