Qualcomm Announces 802.11ax Wi-Fi Chips: Faster Speeds, Better Coverage

[Megalith]

Qualcomm is introducing two new products to herald in the successor to 802.11ac: the IPQ8074 SoC for routers and QCA6290 chip for laptops and other clients. Aside from the obvious and expected improvements (better speeds [up to 4.8Gbps] and superior coverage), 802.11ax also does a much better job at serving multiple devices more efficiently. Best of all is that ax isn’t limited to the 5GHz band, which means you can actually take advantage of it if you’re multiple walls away.

Qualcomm has announced a pair of chips compatible with the new 802.11ax standard. The IPQ8074 is a quad-core 14nm SoC for wireless routers and enterprise access points, and it promises peak speeds of as much as 4.8Gbps across eight 5GHz streams and four 2.4GHz streams, though that peak theoretical speed won't necessarily be what you can expect to see from client devices. On the client side, the QCA6290 chip for laptops, smartphones, and tablets promises peak speeds of 1.775Gbps across two streams.

 

[Zarathustra[H]]

Wow, AC's replacement already. I feel like I just upgraded my WAP's to AC.

 

[sirgallium]

"Aside from the obvious and expected improvements (better speeds [up to 4.8Gbps] and superior coverage)"

I thought that the primary limitation of coverage was FCC regulations on radio broadcast power. Without increasing the power or size of the antenna, you will get no significant range gain.

I know they have fancy stuff know like directional gain so when routers detect a device they can turn more of their broadcast power in that direction and less in other currently unused directions so I guess there are always things like that to help coverage. Maybe they are finding more cool stuff like this that doesn't depend on absolute antenna gain.

It's nice those open router softwares let you turn up the power.

My grandmother couldn't even get a signal from her router which was less than 30 feet away from her because she has aluminum siding and it's a cheap all in one modem router with no external antenna that had to go through 2 layers of aluminum siding to reach her porch. After installing that custom software and turning up the gain a little bit she can now use the internet there, and so can our family when we visit.

It's the same deal with those walky talkies. There is no technical reason that they are only limited to 2 miles or 5 miles or whatever (under ideal conditions with perfect line of sight) just because of FCC broadcast power limitations.

 

[elzeus]

I thought 80211 AD was the next step?

 

[James Robinson]

I've got a bleeding edge router & modem.... basically heating my office @ home because TWC/Spectrum keeps throttling the living hell out of my connection based on my average neighborhood speed and not what I'm paying for.... These improvements don't mean anything to companies that STILL play the numbers games at what they can get away with vs what they promise.

 

[donald_k]

.ax is what .ac should have been in the first place - at least in the physical layer sense. Economies of scale still have to take effect before this becomes mainstream - still lots of viable devices with non-upgradeable radios running on AC/N/A. Look forward to dumping my AC7260 out which replaced junky 2.4GHz-N cihp before it.