Are sluggish Wi-Fi speeds your daily life’s biggest nightmare? Do you wish you could just stream movies without the insistent buffering? Well, your dreams of having a high-speed Wi-Fi connection are about to become a reality, thanks to the latest Wi-Fi 802.11ad standard. This technology could not only propel the development of connectivity devices but also play an important role in usability next-gen. VR headgear.
As announced on Tuesday, the Wi-Fi alliance has finally started certifying laptops, smartphones and routers among other electronic gadgets that come packed with the new superfast connectivity standard dubbed ‘WiGig’. This is a high-speed standard which operates in the 60 GHz spectrum to enable multi-gigabit performance for a hoard of applications.
To add to your knowledge, the Wi-Fi router and receivers that we operate on the daily, usually work on the 2.4 Ghz or 5 Ghz bands. These connectivity options provide you with a decent range, obstacle penetration and speeds and you’ve become accustomed to it. And most of the devices in our vicinity now operate on the same bandwidth, causing the network to get conjusted and ultimately choke.
But, WiGig is the alluring acronym which is itself synonymous to the monstrous low-latency data speeds this tech standard promises to offer the users. This connectivity standard will use beamforming to yield speeds of up to 8 Gbps and enable efficient data transmission. It is around three times faster than the widely used 802.11ac standard Wi-Fi technology, but has just one huge limitation — distance.
WiGig though is the next positive step for Wi-Fi technology but it only works over a very short range of 10 meters. This means that once the technology becomes widely available, you’ll need to present in the same room as the WiGig router to be able to get those superfast download speeds. However, the Wi-Fi Alliance has also added that device manufacturers can implement a hand-off technology to automatically make the switch to 802.11ac the instant you leave the room.
Commenting on the introduction of the new connectivity standard to the enterprise world, Edgar Figueroa, president and CEO of Wi-Fi Alliance says,
Wi-Fi has delighted users for more than 15 years, and WiGig now gives users even higher performance in a rich variety of applications unleashing an unparalleled Wi-Fi experience. WiGig further expands the Wi-Fi CERTIFIED portfolio into 60 GHz, and will augment existing and developing Wi-Fi programs and technologies.
The Wi-Fi Alliance further adds that it expects as many as 180 million devices using the WiGig standard to be available in the market by the end of next year. The acceptance of this standard opens up exciting prospects for the rapid development of wireless standalone VR headsets. You will no longer require tethers to provide the necessary bandwidth to stream 4K content and provide an immersive experience on the headgear.
This dense ‘high-speed’ network will be immensely helpful in progression of streaming quality beyond 4K — which we’re direly waiting for. Some manufacturers such as Dell, Intel and Qualcomm have already started incorporating WiGig in their latest devices, which will start to show up in the market in the coming weeks.
Wi-Fi Alliance certification has a strong history of accelerating broad technology adoption across the industry, and we expect 2017 to be a breakout year for WiGig on the heels of Wi-Fi CERTIFIED program availability,
says Phil Solis, Research Director at ABI Research.
