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[PCWorld] Samsung’s futuristic Wi-Fi five times faster than today’s

October 17, 2014

[PCWorld] Those face-meltingly fast new 802.11ac routers might not be king of the wireless networking world for long. On Sunday, Samsung announced it’s developing new 802.11ad Wi-Fi technology that can turbocharge network speeds fivefold, from today’s 866Mbps per-device maximum to a blistering 4.6Gbps. At that rate, Samsung says, a 1GB movie file can transfer from one device to another in under 3 seconds.

The secret sauce: Ditching the crowded 2.4GHz and 5GHz wireless channels used by today’s routers and jumping to the 60GHz frequency band.

Even though you might not have heard of them, neither the futuristic 802.11ad standard nor the idea of using the 60GHz frequency for ultra-fast Wi-Fi are new. But prior implementations have run into a brick wall, both literally and figuratively: 60GHz signals can’t easily penetrate walls. That’s obviously a big problem for real-world usage. Most of the 60GHz-capable “WiGig” accessories you can find today are designed to operate at very, very short ranges as a result.

But Kim Chang Yong, head of Samsung’s DMC R&D Center, says the company has “successfully overcome the barriers to the commercialization of 60GHz millimeter-wave band Wi-Fi technology.”

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