Broadcom, the company that makes chips for wireless and broadband communications, is unveiling four new wifi chips at CES 2012. This new generation which the company is calling “5G Wifi”, will support speeds up to 1.3Gbps or 162.5 MB per second and use the 802.11ac standard.
For users who do a lot of home video streaming , these new wifi chips will allow them to not only stream content much faster, but allow them to have higher quality content thanks to the fact that the days of buffering are virtually obsolete.
How is Broadcom able to pull it off? From PCWorld :
“The new standard achieves this performance through a variety of mechanisms, including wider channel bandwidth of 80MHz or more, a higher modulation scheme and beamforming, which directs a radio’s signal. In addition, the new standard will solely use the 5GHz band, which currently is less crowded with Wi-Fi and other devices than is Wi-Fi’s other band at 2.4GHz.”
Thanks to these wifi chips running on the 5GHZ band, users can expect very little if any interference at all. As demand for wireless home network streaming grows, this line from Broadcom is sure to support the speeds that people need.
As far as the 802.11n wireless standard today:
“Even the lowest end of 802.11ac technology will outstrip current 802.11n gear, and with lower power consumption. A single-stream radio has a theoretical top speed of 433M bps, or about 350M bps in the real world. Those single-stream components can be used in mobile phones. With 802.11n, even multiple-stream devices don’t typically surpass 300M bps.”
