How fast your phone can scream along on Wi-Fi doesn’t just depend on your internet speed; you also need a killer connection from your router to the device in your hand. A new acquisition by Qualcomm means the tech in question could be in your next phone.
Qualcomm recently announced that it’s buying a little company called Wilocity, which has been working on faster Wi-Fi for years now. With that purchase, it also announced that the upcoming Snapdragon 810 chip will support tri-band wireless, which means it will support old kinds of Wi-Fi, but also a new fangled 60GHz tech called 802.11ad. What’s that really mean? Multi-gigabit Wi-Fi for your phone, and tricks like streaming 4K video.
At the moment, the fastest commercial Wi-Fi band is 802.11ac (5 GHz), which can offer you speeds of around about a Gigabit. That is to say, it can keep up with Google Fibre. The new 802.11ad tech that will be in the Snapdragon 810 can do multiple Gbps speeds. That’s dumb fast. Faster than you’d probably need right now.
Of course this news comes with a whole bunch of buts. To take advantage of a 802.11ad connection, you’ll need a phone that supports it and another device to talk to. 60GHz will be fast, but high-frequency means short range. Your internet speed is nowhere near multiple gigabits per second. And not every phone will have a Snapdragon brain (though Androids do).
The new Snapdragon 810 will be rolling out sometime next summer, so you’ve got some time to wait. But the network in your pocket is poised to get a whole bunch faster. Hopefully the internet to your house can keep up. [Qualcomm via Android Central]
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