Don’t look now, but the speedy WiFi router you just bought may already be old hat. Huawei has tested Wi-Fi based on a future standard that can hit 10.5Gbps – about 10 times faster than what you typically get out of an 802.11ac connection today. The trick, the company says, is making more efficient use of the airwaves. The new technology is smarter at allocating wireless spectrum, juggling data between multiple antennas and cutting back on interference. Huawei doesn’t even have to switch to ultra-high frequencies to make the magic happen; its approach works on the same 5GHz band that many WiFi networks already use.
A new Huawei-backed wi-fi standard is said to have reached a transmission rate of 10.53 gigabits per second at the Chinese vendor’s Shenzen campus. Currently the fastest commercially available wi-fi standard is 802.11ac which uses wide, 80 to 160MHz bands, signal beamforming and 256 level quadrature amplitude modulation for high spectral efficiency, providing real-world speeds of around a third to half of wired gigabit Ethernet. Called 802.11ax, the new standard is aimed at infrastructure wireless deployments. It promises a better user experience in densely populated areas such as offices, shopping malls and stadiums, with a tenfold increase in spectrum efficiency. 802.11ax targets at least a minimum four times speed improvement compared to today’s technology, with the goal being to reach five to ten-fold hikes in througput per access station.
