New start-up Quantenna gets Gigabit WiFi out

WiFi has been around a while but there are always improvements being made. The last major release 802.11n support MIMO, faster transmission speeds and auto-channel selection.

A new standard 802.11ac is an improvement to WiFi operating in the 5GHz band (an improvement to the old 802.11a standard) supporting 80MHz channels (802.11a supports 10/20MHz channels) though it has not actually been ratified yet.

The leaders in the WiFi chip business are Qualcomm Atheros and Broadcom but a new start-up Quantenna with funding from Telefonica has released a new chipset QAC2300 which implements the draft 802.11ac standard. The greater channel size will allow for in-home streaming of things like HD video.

The other major new standard is 802.11ad which operates in the 60GHz band (which is also license exempt in the UK) and this will also allow for extremely high speed services, though the range is very limited as pretty much everything will stop a low power 60GHz signal (like glass and walls) and at higher power it's dangerous as it's ionising radiation which can cause damage to human tissue.

Qualcomm introduces new powerline and WiFi chips

Qualcomm (or to be exact Qualcomm Atheros) has announced severel new chips including the AR7420 which is Homeplug AV compliant and supports up to 500Mb/s wire speed over standard home electrical mains wiring. The chip uses frequencies from 2 MHz to 68 MHz (which may annoy a few ham radio enthusiasts). There's also a companion chip the AR1540 which is a line driver supporting multiple countries.

Also announced is a high performance WiFi system on chip (SoC) known as the AR9580 in co-operation with Mindspeed Technologies which incorporates Qualcomm's 802.11n multi stream WiFi chip in conjunction with Mindspeeds's Comcerto® 1000 broadband packet processors giving 1Gb/s bandwidth suitable for video over WiFi (VoW) solutions. The SoC is suitable for OEMs and end-user designs.

EDIMAX have launched a wireless access point known as the WV-A900APN based on the AR950 suitable for VoW solutions.