Samsung announced yesterday that it is working on developing a 60GHz Wi-fi technology that will give networking speeds of up to 4.6Gbps, which is almost 3.5 times that of the current fastest speeds seen on wireless AC devices that’s 1.3Gbps on the 5MHz band.
To put this into perspective, a 1GB movie file will take less than three seconds to be transferred between devices whereas uncompressed HD videos can be streamed from mobile devices to TVs in real time. Note however, that this does not mean, you can download a 1GB file from the web in 3 seconds.
At the moment, the 60GHz Wi-fi technology is not fully adopted because of poor data performance and signal losses due to the inability to penetrate objects. But according to Samsung, its 802.11ad standard 60GHz Wi-fi technology maintains maximum speeds by eliminating co-channel interference irrespective of the number of devices using the same network. Samsung is also planning to employ a millimetre-wave circuit design and high performance modem technologies to achieve high quality commercially viable 60GHz Wi-fi technology.
Samsung has also worked on the improving signal quality by developing the world’s first micro beam-forming technology that uses communications module in less than 1/3,000th of a second. According to Samsung, this new technology reduced the gap between theoretical speeds and actual speeds.
At the moment, the 60GHz spectrum is unlicensed but it is expected to be commercialised by next year. Samsung indicated that the first applications to take advantage would be telecommunications equipment, Samsung Smart Home devices, wearables and more. Looking at the adoption of 802.11ac just about
starting to pick up, it is safe to assume that it will still take a couple of years before Samsung’s 60GHz Wi-fi technology becomes mainstream.
