LOS ANGELES — We’ve covered developments in 5G extensively. And, while it is coming, it’s important to remember that other technologies aren’t planning to just “step aside” and let 5G eat their lunch.
Right now the cutting-edge of Wi-Fi products are largely based on so-called Wave 2 of the IEEE’s 802.11ac standard. Wave 2, as compared to Wave 1, can push speeds up to about 2.34 Gbps and offers multi-user multiple-input, multiple-output (MU-MIMO), according to rcrwireless.com.
The next generation of Wi-Fi, 802.11ax will begin to emerge soon, to facilitate the growing number of “things” connected to the internet, according to wi-fi.org. “802.11ax will deliver greater capacity and the ability to provide more users access to high-bandwidth applications and services. 802.11ax builds on existing Wi-Fi techniques and will bring significant benefits in dense network environments. In 2018, 802.11ax will begin to make its way into Wi-Fi chipsets and will help meet growing demands on Wi-Fi networks.”
Quantenna, Intel, Qualcomm and others have been sampling pre-standard 11ax chips for nearly 18 months and Japanese network operator KDDI already offers a pre-standard 11ax access point made by NEC using Qualcomm’s IPQ8078 chip, reports rcrwireless.
