Broadcom’s 5G WiFi: 5 Ways it Improves Your Internet Experience
Posted: Jan. 08, 2015 blog.broadcom.com
LAS VEGAS — Before I was
hired to be part of Broadcom’s Blog Squad at the International
Consumer Electronics Show this week, I hadn’t really given much thought to how
much or how often an embedded semiconductor company touches our lives.
Home
automation technology on display at the Broadcom booth at CES 2015.
I quickly discovered that
Broadcom’s Wi-Fi and Bluetooth chips and other connection wizardry reside in
the mechanical closets of most of our gadgets. That includes phones, computers,
set top boxes, game consoles, dongles — really any electronic device that wants
to send and receive information—as well as the back-end networking equipment
that transmits data to and from data centers.
I covered many topics for
Broadcom this week, from smart homes
today, the future of wearables, and a show overview. But it was Broadcom’s newmulti-user
Wi-Fi technology that interested me the
most. And while that may sound fabulously boring, if not disingenuous, I really
mean it.
Here’s why: Bandwidth is all I
really crave now.
I don’t care about the specs in
my iPhone, Chromebook, Roku, or any other gadget I own. I just want their apps
to work. For that to happen, I need a robust connection at home and work that’s
smart enough to handle the growing number of concurrent users and devices all
working together to clog the intertubes.
Are You Wi-Fi
Ready? Smart Devices Need Robust 5G WiFi to Maximize Their Potential
Earlier this week, Broadcom unveiled a suite of 5G WiFi-enabled router products designed to bring 802.11ac performance to the modern home Wi-Fi router or workhorse enterprise access points so that speedier, bandwidth-busting hubs can better serve every connected device.
Here are five reasons everyone
should care about smarter, faster, wider-ranging and multi-user Wi-Fi:
It overcomes grainy video
streams. I’m fortunate to have Google
Fiber in my home. But the included 802.11n router is ill-suited for the task
when several video streams or devices jump on the network. This is because old
routers weren’t meant to handle the amount of devices we connect to them now.
That, and they’re incapable of throttling older or distant devices that are
hogging bandwidth, power, and signals as the access point attempts to maintain
a connection with them. This is particularly troubling for video streams, one Broadcom
engineer told me, which explains the lag I experience when my kids log on to
Netflix while my wife and I use other Internet applications.
It supports multiple
users. Because not all Web traffic is
equal, the Internet can sometimes slow down, depending on the applications
others are using on the network at the same time. “Wi-Fi is a lot like highway
lanes,” Broadcom’s Ananda Roy, a wireless applications software engineer, told
me this week. “5G WiFi widens those lanes and adds more of them so your newer
devices don’t get stuck behind slow devices or in rush hour traffic.” I was
unable to test the experience at home, but there’s no reason to believe the
technology isn’t a significant improvement over my 802.11n router.
It plays nice with existing devices. Not
only are 5G WiFi routers backward-compatible with older wireless devices,
chances are, anything you’ve bought in the last three years already supports
the standard. That means next-gen Wi-Fi is available today for less than it
cost when it was released several years ago. Buying a new wireless router is
anything but a status purchase, “but it improves the quality of experience of
all the devices we love,” Roy said.
It has better range and wall throughput. That’s
a fancy way of saying 5G WiFi offers better coverage and signal strength to the
devices you connect, whether they’re in the corner room upstairs, the basement
downstairs, or passing through concrete walls at the office. In short, 5G WiFi
lets you do more with the internet you already have because it manages multiple
devices better, while future-proofing your home or office network.
It downloads and transfers data 5x
faster. Even though I get gigabit
internet at home when wired in, I only get 200 mbps on wireless. First world
problems, I know. But I’m paying for a Gig. Shouldn’t my router support it and
all the glorious transfer speeds, downloads, and uploads that come with it?
With 802.11ac Wave 2 routers, the answer is yes. And according to Broadcom’s
Manny Patel, 5GWiFi performance is up to 40 percent faster than older
variations of Wi-Fi.
Reporting from the Consumer
Electronics Show in Las Vegas, I’m Blake Snow. Thanks for reading. May all your
connections be speedy this year.
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