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Fastest Wi-Fi ever is almost ready for real-world use

arstechnica.com

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Re: Fastest Wi-Fi ever is almost ready for real-world use

#3
As nice as the speed is, I think the real application is docking stations for mobile devices - think iPhone, android, etc. I take my mobile device with me, put it near a wigi router and all of a sudden I have a wireless keyboard mouse monitors etc all hooked up. No wires required. No setup, nothing!! Very cool for portability!! My friend comes over and they just bring their devices to the table and were using another mobile device fully integrated. The mobile device is a portable brain. Very cool!!

Re: Fastest Wi-Fi ever is almost ready for real-world use

#4

As nice as the speed is, I think the real application is docking stations for mobile devices - think iPhone, android, etc. I take my mobile device with me, put it near a wigi router and all of a sudden I have a wireless keyboard mouse monitors etc all hooked up. No wires required. No setup, nothing!! Very cool for portability!! My friend comes over and they just bring their devices to the table and were using another…

You could even automtically hook up your phone to your tv, etc. no wires needed. As long as your phone carries everything, it can be hooked up to anything automatically when you step into a room!

Re: Fastest Wi-Fi ever is almost ready for real-world use

#5
I'm looking forward to this. I have two great rooms that may have a dozen active devices at any moment. I'm ok with the single-room applications for both of these common areas.

I can imagine a lot of similar places in offices. Cubicles could have antanae attached or be made of a material that is more willing to reflect the beams; much easier than pulling wires.

Re: Fastest Wi-Fi ever is almost ready for real-world use

#6

"...with the downside of using frequencies that are easily blocked by walls. Even thin cubicle walls may block signals, Wilocity acknowledged. "

Not good for a house, but very useful for apartments in large buildings. You can have one wireless AP in each room (connected to eachother with wires), and almost no interference from the neighbours.

Re: Fastest Wi-Fi ever is almost ready for real-world use

#8

"...with the downside of using frequencies that are easily blocked by walls. Even thin cubicle walls may block signals, Wilocity acknowledged. "

That quote is referring to the theoretical 7Gbps speed, not it's standard one.

It's actually the radio frequency itself that doesn't penetrate walls - it's not a bandwidth restriction, so it has nothing to do with theoretical throughput.

Re: Fastest Wi-Fi ever is almost ready for real-world use

#9
post #6

"...with the downside of using frequencies that are easily blocked by walls. Even thin cubicle walls may block signals, Wilocity acknowledged. "

Not good for a house, but very useful for apartments in large buildings. You can have one wireless AP in each room (connected to eachother with wires), and almost no interference from the neighbours.

Is there no developing, competing standard that improves on current WiFi without these drawbacks?

Re: Fastest Wi-Fi ever is almost ready for real-world use

#10

"...with the downside of using frequencies that are easily blocked by walls. Even thin cubicle walls may block signals, Wilocity acknowledged. "

That's an asset for a lot of indoor applications, as it allows an independent cell in each room, meaning minimal loss of data capacity due to interference between cells in the same band. You need an access point for each room, but that's okay once the hardware is cheap. For new installations, one can wire a building for data, analogous to wiring for lighting, with access points in place of luminaries. Eventually we will see light fittings with inbuilt 60GHz access points? The usage scenario for 60GHz is similar to infrared. The main advantage of 60GHz being that it able to penetrate a wider range of materials, thus offering better coverage.

It will be interesting to see what the patent landscape is for this. I'm hopeful that it will be largely unencumbered, so will become mainstream quickly. The basic system was defined 15-20 years ago, as OFDM based WLAN was always intended to operate in the 60GHz bands [1]. For the last 15-20 years its been a case of waiting for (cheap) radio technology to catch up with, and enable, the original WLAN vision.

[1] http://www.sss-mag.com/pdf/97_mmlan.pdf

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