By Claus Hetting, Wi-Fi NOW CEO & Chairman
Another eventful week in the world of Wi-Fi included multiple new product launches related to Wi-Fi 6 and 60 GHz Wi-Fi – not to mention new numbers from the world’s flagship City Wi-Fi network in New York City. Here are the week’s most important Wi-Fi news items:
Ooredoo & Netgear announce world’s first Wi-Fi 6 consumer product
The Gulf Times reports that Qatar’s Ooredoo is ‘planning to introduce’ the Netgear Nighthawk AX12 Wi-Fi router to its customers as part of its fibre-based broadband offering. The announcement comes even before Netgear themselves have made any statement about their new Wi-Fi 6 product. With the launch, Ooredoo would become the first EMEA-region operator to deploy a Wi-Fi 6 solution.
The Netgear AX12 is also the first consumer-grade Wi-Fi 6 product that we know of.
“Nighthawk AX12 offers Gigabit Internet up to 6 Gbps Wi-Fi speeds and WPA3, the latest Wi-Fi security standard designed for enhanced security in public and private networks. An ultra-fast 2.2GHz quad-core processor ensures speed and performance for more Wi-Fi devices and high-speed applications,” the news report says.
The photo of the Nighthawk AX12 rendered here to the left (courtesy Gulf Times) is the first photo we have seen of such a device. Reputable sources tell us that the new Netgear 12-stream device is powered by Qualcomm chips. Qualcomm is right now one of two chipset companies that we know of offering a 12-stream solution (the second company is Quantenna). The 12 streams are a consequence of 8 streams of 5 GHz plus four 2.4 GHz streams.
Note: The above has been corrected since first published to reflect that both Qualcomm and Quantenna currently offer 12-stream Wi-Fi 6 chipset solutions. We apologise for previous inaccuracies.
Qualcomm launches 10+ Gbps mmWave Wi-Fi
Qualcomm is arguably the early front runner in the race to commercialise Wi-Fi 6 but the company is also not pulling any punches in getting to market first with new unlicensed millimetre wave gear. Last week Qualcomm launched its bid to dominate the 60 GHz chipset market with a family of products supporting the 802.11ay standard.
The 802.11ay standard is essentially a souped-up (meaning bandwidth aggregated) and hence extremely fast version of 802.11ad-based 60 GHz Wi-Fi. The AY chips – now available for both infrastructure and mobile devices – bond several 60 GHz channels together to deliver speeds of more than 10 Gbps Wi-Fi, “extending Wi-Fi experiences to the 5G era,” the company says.
As examples of how 60 GHz Wi-Fi is being used today, Qualcomm cites Facebook’s Terragraph and smartphone vendor Asus, who launched the world’s first 60 GHz capable device last year. Only a small handful of consumer-grade routers support the 802.11ad standard as of today.
Qualcomm’s launch also kind of begs the question as to what naming conventions may eventually be adopted for 802.11ad and 802.11ay products now that the Wi-Fi Alliance has announced new names for generations of 802.11-based products, most notably Wi-Fi 6. Qualcomm for the time being seems to have settled for ’60 GHz Wi-Fi’ as at least the interim name for what used to be called WiGig.
LinkNYC tops 5 million users
The world’s undisputed flagship City Wi-Fi project – LinkNYC of New York City – last month announced new user and network numbers. We kind of missed that but here they are for reference now: LinkNYC now tops 5 million users and some 20 million Wi-Fi sessions per week. The company also says more than 1700 kiosk units have been installed across the Big Apple.
LinkNYC’s younger sister-project in the UK is called InLinkUK and is operated by BT. InLinkUK last week was shortlisted for a Wi-Fi NOW 2018 Affordable Connectivity award.
/Claus.
