Broadcom is the third major vendor to announce availability of chips supporting the latest evolution of WiFi. Broadcom’s 802.11ax chipset release includes three separate products for residential gateways, enterprise access points, and smartphones, according to WiFiNow.
Broadcom says that their 802.11ax solution will be a massive boost to WiFi quality, speed, and efficiency: Four times faster download, six times faster upload, four times better coverage, and seven times better battery life compared to current WiFi using the 802.11ac standard, WiFiNow reported.
The company has dubbed their solution ‘Max Wi-Fi’ and has launched this website for more details. The 802.11ax standard is the sixth generation of WiFi technology to be released.
Much of the speed boost will come from wider channels (160 MHz), higher-order modulation (1024 QAM), and support for four streams of 802.11ax. But the most important feature of 802.11ax is arguably uplink and downlink OFDMA (scheduling), which will make this new generation of WiFi operate in a manner similar to cellular networks, WiFiNow reported.
The purpose of OFDMA is to do away with on-air packet collisions, thus making WiFi data transmissions faster and much more spectrum efficient. The feature means 802.11ax will serve up much-improved WiFi, especially where the density of users and devices is high.
Broadcom’s 802.11ax solution is likely – at least for starters – to be targeting the huge residential market for WiFi-capable CPEs: This year, some 180 million WiFi-capable residential gateways will be shipped and that number is projected to grow to 200 million units by 2020. The company says that a four-family home will need connectivity for up to 50 WiFi devices by 2022.
August 22, 2017
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