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.

Comments

Nice!

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Nice!

[TWX]

I would prefer a router that all things being equal, the one with active cooling would likely get my purchase.

I think that you'd find yourself in the minority, especially when the fans get dirty and start making noise. It'll be even worse for those who ceiling-mount their WAPs since it'll likely be unobstructed by anything that would block the noise.

Re:Nice!

[MachineShedFred]

Now only if that AP that has capability of 4.something Gbps would be connected by more than a single 1Gbps ethernet line.

10GbE is still prohibitively expensive for most build-outs of wireless networks.

Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Wow

[TWX]

Having tested my cablemodem speeds, I could still get away with 802.11g and not see any noticeable bottleneck at the wireless.

Re:Wow

[pr0fessor]

The 802.11g is only 54mbps my service gets about 80mbps during the peak hours when it's a little slower. I'm using 802.11n which is 600mpbs and have no problem streaming hd from the internet and my local media server to 3-4 devices at the same time.

Who needs this?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Who needs this?

[msk]

I'm still on 3Mbps DSL because I use a reseller who offers uncapped service.

Until I can get faster speed, uncapped, for the same price, I'll stick with what I have.

Re:Who needs this?

[hipp5]

who needs this much headroom in Wifi?

Local network? Transferring files from my wireless devices to my computer? Streaming from my devices to my TV?

Re:Who needs this?

[zifn4b]

Local network? Transferring files from my wireless devices to my computer? Streaming from my devices to my TV?

Yes, this is true. 4K streaming content will become common place at some point then followed by 8K. This will probably happen because at some point you won't be able to buy a 1080p television and then eventually not even a 4K one but you didn't even mention some of the real challenges around WIFI that until recently we haven't even a made a dent in.

Coverage area is a real problem for WIFI especially when you consider a 2000-3000 sq. ft. house let alone a 4000-5000 sq. ft. house. The conventional solution to this in an office setting is to use WIFI mesh appliances that support free roaming, however the price point for these tend to be out of reach of the average consumer and then they don't have the know-how to configure it appropriately. It's only recently that we've made a dent with consumer devices that have multiple 5ghz channels, more advanced WIFI extenders and then there's Google WIFI which I believe is a true free roaming mesh consumer grade WIFI solution. But I mean that literally just came out months ago! I also wish I would have known that was coming out otherwise I wouldn't have purchased a Netgear Nighthawk X6 with an extender.

I think this new standard might actually converge on WIFI becoming almost equivalent with wired networking. We do need this type of solution in consumer homes. Not everyone can have a home built and talk to the superintendent of the home to allow them to show up before the drywall is put in and take a spade bit and drill through headers to run your own networks drops, junction boxes, etc. I did this one time and ran Cat 5e through a home to a patch panel in my garage with a gigabit switch but not everyone can do that and not everyone buys brand new home construction. Better more reliable WIFI standards with better coverage and better support for free roaming mesh WIFI solves this problem.

Re:Who needs this?

[MachineShedFred]

If you can afford a 5,000 square foot home, you can afford the more advanced networking gear necessary to have wireless coverage in that same home.

Re:Who needs this?

[klapaucjusz]

who needs this much headroom in Wifi?

University campuses? Conference halls? Hotels? Youth hostels?

(MU-MIMO is about increasing performance with multiple simultaneous clients, unlike plain MIMO, which only increases the throughput to a single client.)

Re: Who needs this?

[Miamicanes]

Wireless HDMI. And maybe some future standard for PCIe and Thunderbolt over TCP/IP (the way we now have semi-standards for transporting USB, SCSI, and FireWire over TCP/IP (like almost every networked printserver appliance now sold).

At some point, it probably WILL become cheaper & easier to transmit insanely fast data without wires. At least, if you have fiber to each room, feeding a 60GHz access point with 20 feet of cat6 doing 10-gig ethernet. At that point, the wireless network is basically short-range de-facto open-air fiber [without the actual fiber].

Re: Who needs this?

[Miamicanes]

I almost bought 3 UniFi AC-pro units, until I discovered that they eliminated the ONE GODDAMN FEATURE from their AC models that made their hardware unique: Zero-Handoff.

Yeah, ZH was bad for networks with lots of users spread across a large area, but it was PERFECT for making 2.4GHz wifi usable by a small group of people in congested urban areas [by allowing you to put a 2.4ghz AP in every room with transparent hand-offs that ACTUALLY WORKED with Android devices & shout over your neighbors (~97% of Android devices STILL have fucked-up wpa-supplicants that won't switch APs unless the AP literally kicks them off.)

Re: Who needs this?

[WarJolt]

Wifi mesh back haul channels that don't reduce your 802.11ac channel capacities when you are too lazy to run that fucking capable through your crawlspace.

Re:Who needs this?

[zifn4b]

If you can afford a 5,000 square foot home, you can afford the more advanced networking gear necessary to have wireless coverage in that same home.

Fair enough but how many of those home owners actually possess the ability to set it up? Hire a business contractor to do that for them? Most people that I know that own that type of home aren't rich by any stretch of the imagination.

Re: Who needs this?

[zifn4b]

~97% of Android devices STILL have fucked-up wpa-supplicants that won't switch APs unless the AP literally kicks them off.

Yup this is a big problem. By "kicks you off" you mean lose the signal of the current AP (MAC Address) entirely forcing it to search for another AP. It's both a client and a server problem which is remarkable considering that we've been going at wireless networking for almost 20 years now. How hard is it to periodically measure the dB level of the signals and seamlessly switch to the one with the better signal?

Re:Ethernet

[TWX]

The limit isn't the speed from the switch to the PC, it's the speed from the switch to the router that all of the wired and wireless clients have to share. Or in a home, the speed from the local L3 routing device to the ISP.

It doesn't do you any good to put up dozens of APs and to provide literally hundreds of switchports if you're only uplinking at 1000BaseT. Even 10GBaseT would be a limit in such an environment.

Better home WiFi performance soon?

[pahles]

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.

How long before this is cheap?

[davidwr]

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?

Re:How long before this is cheap?

[AmiMoJo]

Probably never for USB sticks or built into phones etc. To get the full bandwidth you need 12 antennas it appears. Like 802.11AC, most devices will only be able to use a small fraction of the available bandwidth.

That's probably for the best, we don't really want one laptop trying to transmit over the entire 2.4 and 5GHz spectrums at once. 2.4GHz is bad enough already, with existing wifi and Bluetooth. At least 5GHz has poor penetration.

Re:How long before this is cheap?

[davidwr]

Probably never for USB sticks or built into phones etc. To get the full bandwidth you need 12 antennas it appears

I should've specified that I was accounting for this.

To rephrase:

How long before non-routers with "up to a 4x increase in throughput speed in a crowded network [and] 2x2 MU-MIMO" using the new .ax standard for under $20 on a USB stick (including antennas) or built-in to laptops and phones for about the same as currently-popular high-speed WiFi technology?

Can I ax you a question...

[Luthair]

hur hur

Why not one chip for all systems?

[swb]

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?

Re:Why not one chip for all systems?

[MachineShedFred]

Wattage on the radio, and antenna inputs.

You don't need the capability to plug 8 antennae into your phone, but you may want that for an access point. Also, your phone would drain the battery if running with the wattage that a normal AP does, from either PoE or a wall wart.

Re:Ethernet

[AF_Cheddar_Head]

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...

In a home environment wireless can out perform wired as long as you don't have interference issues with your neighbors, but in an office environment where everyone connects to the same or a limited number of WAPs you have contention issues that bring the available bandwidth for each client down to less than optimal.

For a while I worked in an "open plan" office where everyone connected via wireless, many people used a tethered cell phone for access as it was SO much faster and more reliable than using the office "wi-fi" connections. The company had a screwed up infrastructure that treated every connection as external so you went through the external firewall whether using the provided wi-fi or tethered cell.

How wil this help rural Internet customers?

[Streetlight]

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.

Re:How wil this help rural Internet customers?

[squiggleslash]

You'll be able to do things on your own network much more quickly and/or reliably, such as move files between machines, or streaming video from, say, your desktop to your TV.

No, obviously it won't help with browsing the world wide web, but why would you expect it to and why would you think that's the problem it's trying to solve?

Re:How wil this help rural Internet customers?

[aaarrrgggh]

There are a lot of good rural WISPs that can get you 10-50Mb easily, and more with additional work. If there isn't one in the area, start a co-op or get a WISP to expand coverage with a committed pool of customers.

Passive Wifi

[backslashdot]

Are they going to make a passive wifi chip or at least support ambient wifi ? Smartwatches badly need passive wifi chips (or passive bluetooth).

Re:Ethernet

[Anne Thwacks]

I think your definition of "nobody" is somewhat specialised.

If your ISP is BT, you can probably get away with 811b. 100 Base T is definitely overkill.

And FSTH (Fibre Strait To Hell) won't get here this century unless BT is somehow involved in a nuclear attack.

Is it enough?

[Locke2005]

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...

Re:Misleading as usual?

[Locke2005]

Probably most of the 802.11ax protocol is done in firmware, not in the chip silicon. By saying it's a 802.11ax chip, they're just saying it meets the frequency demands of the current version of the spec, and they'll ship new firmware when the spec is finalized. Has that been a problem for any of the 802.11 pre-finalization chips yet?