Today, the fastest wireless network technology is the IEEE 802.11ac which is almost at par with an Ethernet connection of 1Gb/s. Before that, an IEEE 802.11n wireless was considered one of fastest throughput technology over Wi-Fi.
PCWorld reported that a new technology breakthrough from Quantenna Communications with the latest Wi-Fi chipset can deliver blazing speeds of up to 10Gb/s over the airwaves. Most wireless routers can simultaneously send and receive data using three spatial data streams, called 3x3 MIMO. With presently available wireless ac routers from brands such as Linksys, data delivery can reach throughput speeds of almost 1.3Gb/s using the 5GHz frequency band while ASUS’ recent announcement at the CES introducing a new router using Quantenna’s existing 4x4 MIMO chipset will give throughput speeds of up to 1.7Gb/s.
Yesterday, Quantenna announced that it was working on an 8x8 MIMO technology chipset, which can deliver an astonishing 10GB/s throughput speed. The new technology will incorporate all older standards, namely 802.11 a, b, g, n, and ac and will be based on MU-MIMO technology (multi-user-MIMO).
The new chipset is intelligent—it can deliver adaptive beam forming, in which the transmitter and receiver can analyse the exchanged signals and accordingly ascertain the optimal beaming path to reject unwanted signals in the air.
Quantenna says it expects the chipsets to be used in a wide range of applications, which include enterprise and consumer networking and also for ISP benefits, especially outdoor connectivity.
However, smartphones and tablets would not be able to benefit from this technology as yet since the company does not have any roadmap on developing 8x8 MIMO antennas for battery-powered appliances and USB Wi-Fi devices. Therefore, routers, PCIe cards, bridges, and notebook and desktop motherboards would be the only ones benefitting from the new high-speed technology.
