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Qualcomm's New 802.11ax Chips Will Ramp Up Your Wi-Fi (cnet.com)
Your home Wi-Fi performance could soon get much better thanks to new Wi-Fi chips that Qualcomm announced today, the IPQ8074 system-on-chip (SoC) for broadcasters (routers and access points) and the QCA6290 SoC for receivers (Wi-Fi devices). They belong to the first end-to-end commercial Wi-Fi portfolio to support the all-new 802.11ax standard. From a report on CNET: Qualcomm says the IPQ8074 is a highly-integrated all-in-one platform designed for access points, gateways and routers. The 14nm chip integrates an 11ax radio, MAC and baseband, and a quad-core 64-bit A53 CPU as well as a dual-core network accelerator. It uses a 12x12 Wi-Fi configuration (8x8 on the 5GHz band and 4x4 on the 2.4GHz band) and supports MU-MIMO for uplink. As a result, it can deliver up to 4.8 Gbps while maintaining fast connections over a larger coverage area than any 802.11ac chip. On the client side, Qualcomm says the QCA6290 SoC can offer up to a 4x increase in throughput speed in a crowded network. It supports 2x2 MU-MIMO and can realize the full benefits of the 8x8 MU-MIMO thanks to its 8x8 sounding mechanism. The chip can combine 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands using its Dual Band Simultaneous (DBS) feature to deliver up to 1.8 Gbps Wi-Fi speed. Compared with 802.11ac, the chip can reduce power consumption by two-thirds.
Finally some good MIMO tech coming to replace AC. I was a bit disappointed when I purchased my first AC router thinking the dual band would be for simultaneous connections. Boy was I wrong. Advertising lingo confused me into thinking it was something it wasn't. Sounds like AX MIMO is what I thought AC was going to be. Reduction in TDP is a welcome upgrade too as most routers do not have active cooling and some models were burning out from the load. I would prefer a router that all things being equal, the one with active cooling would likely get my purchase.
If these numbers are even close to being accurate, that's some impressive speed. I remember not that long ago when the wireless connection was the bottleneck in my network. This blows my cable modem speed out of the water.
Now taking bets on if gigabit Ethernet will still outperform wireless in almost all use cases that don't require someone to be able to sit in their office chair with their laptop and spin continuously like this sentence...
go outside NERD
With the average broadband speed who needs this much headroom in Wifi? Maybe some plus to having less power consumption, and built in compatibility long term. But most won't ever be able to experience any difference over AC speeds or even some N speeds. This obsession that most people need or 1 Gbps wifi is not being honest with consumers. As if a continually increase in local network speed somehow results in better internet speed. I know plenty of consumers who bought a $200 router and complained it never fixed their 3 mbps DSL speed internet.
Yeah, if I buy a new router/access point AND a device that both have this new chip. My guess for most this will rather be later than soon.
Sig?
How long before this tech or some other vendor's version of the same thing is widely available in under-$40 home WiFi routers, under-$20 USB sticks, and at about the same cost to build into phones and laptops as today's commonly-used WiFi chips?
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
hur hur
I suppose it boils down to something like die size or power consumption, but considering that a lot of smartphones can act as access points, why not provide all functionality in one chip?
If the router doesn't run OpenWRT/LEDE, I'm not buying it.
And lots of other people need this too. Just about everyone using WiFi needs this.
But, you should be aware that the WiFi industry measures things differently than real life. Based on the specs in the article, the best data transfer speed that a client could expect to achieve in one direction would be around 700Mbps. It's more probable that they will get significantly less.
700Mbps might be faster than your girly internet connection, but I'm sure you'll realize that it is just slightly less that the real world throughput of a Gigabit LAN connection. Such connections are regularly saturated in enterprise environments where pulling a large PDF or a small CAD file from a server to a client is a common daily task. Also, don;t forget that it is common to bridge buildings with hundreds of clients per side with WiFi, so the need for links with up to 10Gbps is extensive, though still very expensive to achieve.
Some of my cousins live in rural Iowa and are connected to Century link with ~500 kbit/sec Internet connections. Their computer can talk to their phones and vice versa really, really fast with this technology, but DSL connections will still be pretty slow. Their phones have relatively fast Internet connections but with the data speed caps for "unlimited" cell phone plans, cell phone connections to the Internet are not terribly useful for the things most families use the Internet for.
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell
802.11ax is not even in final draft stage yet, AFAIK. Maybe this box does proper MU-MIMO on the high-end rates of 802.11ac (i.e. 4x4:4@160MHz), and has lots of private, quasi-802.11ax extensions?
Besides, given this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11ax#Illegal_actions_of_DensiFi_SIG
I am quite wary of anything claiming to be 802.11ax at this time. Qualcomm is in the list of those playing sabotage games against the IEEE 802.11ax WG (TGax).
Are they going to make a passive wifi chip or at least support ambient wifi ? Smartwatches badly need passive wifi chips (or passive bluetooth).
Who needs more than 640 KB of memory? Why, no one needs that much (said every computer grandpa, everywhere, at some point).
Really, you need to stretch those brain cells a bit. "3 mbps DSL speed internet" isn't some kind of mandate from heaven and that too shall pass. In the meantime you take progress where you can get it and right now, the 802.11x standards are on a tear. Only a fool will turn away from easy wins.
I remember when DOS and character interfaces were entrenched and couldn't imagine the amount of work required to change that. It changed. I remember when mainframes and minis ran my corporations and struggled to imagine how much money would be required to change that. It changed. I remember when achieving motion video was so hard it was just barely possible, but only on a special rig and even then the quality was terrible. That changed too.
Sure, it's a start, but is bandwidth keeping pace with the bandwidth demands of slashdot reader's porn? VR takes twice as much bandwidth...
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
OpenWRT is years behind Qualcomm's proprietary driver and features. If you're doing 11g or 11n stuff it's fine, but it takes 2 years for the open source driver to get various support and still doesn't support various features.
I never understood the fascination with OpenWRT. It's pretty crappy once you start actually QAing it properly.
I don't care if it's five years behind. I don't need backdoors in my routers.
8x8 + 4x4 = 80
12x12 = 144