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What is mobile gigabit, and why should you care?
You may have heard about this thing called a gigabit phone recently. The term was thrown around a lot during the launch of Samsung's Galaxy S8, since that's the first commercially available handset to support the technology. But gigabit will also be included on Sony's Xperia XZ Premium and other high-end phones, which means you'll probably hear about it a lot more later this year. And it's going to be a big deal.
AT&T starts testing 5G wireless with Intel in Austin
Verizon may have beat AT&T to the punch, but no matter -- the second-biggest US carrier has started testing 5G wireless technology that promises to bring gigabit bandwidth to our mobile devices in the coming years. In a blog post, AT&T says that it is taking the 5G bandwidth tests it was making in labs out into the field, with Intel and Ericsson serving as partners in this venture. Like Verizon, AT&T is using millimeter wave technology; in this case, the 5G technology is working inside of one of Intel's Austin offices.
Google's Fiber rollout isn't going as planned
Google Fiber may have just gone live in Salt Lake City, but the process of laying all that fiber optic cable is reportedly making Alphabet's homebrewed ISP the company's most expensive unit outside of the core Google business. According to a new report from The Information, those costs have prompted Larry Page and Sergey Brin to push Google Fiber away from its original plan and more towards a cheaper wireless standard.
Belkin's new 802.11ac wireless routers feed next-gen networking needs
Broadcom rolled out its new wireless Gigabit 802.11ac chips in January of this year, and since then Buffalo, Netgear and ASUS have all delivered routers packing the speedy new new tech. Well, Belkin's finally joining the party with its new AC1000 and AC1200 dual-band routers sporting 802.11ac/b/g/n wireless and four Gigabit Ethernet ports. Courtesy of the ac chip inside, the $140 AC1000 delivers a max throughput of 665Mbps on the 5GHz band, while the AC1200 ups that speed to 867Mbps and will set you back $160. Once they go on sale at the end of June, you just gotta grab an appropriate ASUS laptop or find a phone packing Marvell's latest WiFi silicon and you'll actually be able to take advantage of that massive throughput -- assuming your broadband connection cooperates, of course.%Gallery-158841%
ZTE throws weight behind WiGig, because the real fun happens at 60GHz
Venture far out into the wireless spectrum, until the familiar 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands are but flecks on the horizon, and eventually you'll come across a party raging in the middle of nowhere. There are only a few geeks dancing in the 60GHz (802.11ad) tent at present, but prototype devices are already emerging and now Chinese manufacturer ZTE has joined the WiGig alliance too. With the latest standard promising a maximum throughput of 7Gbps, potentially even for smartphones, homesickness seems unlikely.[Burning Man photo via Shutterstock]
Gigabit 802.11ac Wi-Fi may be coming to Apple devices soon
Apple was the first computer manufacturer to popularize Wi-Fi, pioneering the adoption of the early 802.11b standard, then 802.11g, and raising the speed limit with 802.11n in 2007. Now AppleInsider is reporting that the company is expected to start providing support for the "Gigabit Wi-Fi" 802.11ac standard in 2012. To provide lightning-fast wireless networking, 802.11ac uses up to four times the frequency bandwidth (up to 160 MHz), more antennas (up to eight; existing Macs use up to three), and hyper-efficient data transfers through more sophisticated modulation schemes. The standard hasn't yet been approved by the 802.11 Working Group, but things are moving along at a fast clip. Many suppliers, including Apple component manufacturer Broadcom, have announced 802.11ac chipsets. The new equipment not only provides network speeds above 1 Gigabit per second (about three times the speed of existing 802.11n networks), but also offers improved reliability, better power efficiency, and more range. When the changes come, they'll most likely first appear in the form of new AirPort base stations and a new Time Capsule, and then start rolling out to new Mac models and mobile devices. Where the new technology will have the biggest impact is in the user of other Apple technologies such as AirPlay, AirPlay Mirroring, and AirDrop. Now aren't you glad you didn't run Ethernet cabling all over your house?
Hitachi, Panasonic and Toshiba to deliver 60GHz wireless products in 2H 2010
The year's 2010, yet we're still leering at the dusty pile of cables behind our AV equipment and wondering, "O UWB, where art thou?" Well, the folks at Tech-On have got a little update for us: Hitachi, Panasonic and Toshiba are reported to be delivering products donning 60GHz wireless chips -- which sip little juice but churn out 7GHz of colossal bandwidth and 1.5Gbps of data rate -- in the second half of this year. While none of the manufacturers are directly pimping either WirelessHD or WiGig, it appears that Hitachi and Panasonic are siding with WiGig's extra functionalities like media access control (MAC), and the latter even envisions "embedding the functionality into portable gear" for downloading digital content from kiosks. Either way, it's nice to see some progress here -- we don't want things to drag on any longer, do we?
WiGig Alliance completes multi-gigabit 60GHz wireless specification: let the streaming begin
The WiGig Alliance captured our imaginations back in May, but now it seems that the world of multi-gigabit streaming is so close, we can taste the data slipping over our tongues on their way to the next access point. Put simply, the specification that the group has been toiling on over the past few months is finally complete, and while some of its members have been prototyping wares along the way, this 1.0 announcement effectively opens the flood gates for partnering outfits to implement it into their gear. In case you're curious as to how 60GHz will help you, have a listen: WiGig enables wireless transfer rates more than ten times faster than today's fastest wireless LAN, and it's completely backward compatible with existing WiFi devices. As we've already seen with those totally bodacious dual-band (2.4GHz / 5GHz) routers, having another band with this kind of speed potential can only mean great things for the future. We had a talk with Dr. Ali Sadri (the group's chairman and president) as well as Mark Grodzinsky (board director and marketing work group chair) in order to get a better idea of what's at play here, and frankly, we're anxious to see this get implemented into... well, just about anything. WiGig v1.0 supports data transmission rates up to 7Gbps, and if living in a house full of WiGig-enabled devices, you could finally envision streaming HD content from a bedroom PC to an HDTV and a living room netbook without any wires whatsoever. In the case of the netbook, there's even a chance that the embedded WiGig module could support faster transfer rates than the sockets around the edges, which would simultaneously enable wireless to be faster than the wired (at least in this scenario) and your brain to melt. Finally, the group has picked up four new members -- NVIDIA, AMD, SK Telecom and TMC -- though unfortunately, WiGig wouldn't comment on the future availability of 60GHz products. We were told that they would be shocked if anyone had a prototype 60GHz device on the CES show floor, but you can bet that won't stop us from looking. Oh, and if we had to take a wild guess, we'd surmise that companies interested in speeding up their own offerings will be jumping on this quick, so hopefully you'll be ditching 2.4GHz once and for all come next summer(ish).
