By Claus Hetting, WiFi NOW CEO & Chairman
Malaysia to install 35,000 APs at universities and colleges
A huge public connectivity project is underway in Malaysia as the country embarks on equipping its universities and colleges with Wi-Fi. According to this local news report close to 35,000 APs will be installed by July this year with more than 3,100 already having been installed as of this month. Communications Minister Fahmi Fadzil says he hopes “this will comprehensively resolve internet issues at all public universities.” The Malaysian government is spending 175 million Malaysian Ringgits or about US$39M on the project.
Airties & Qualcomm to showcase better 5G FWA-backed home Wi-Fi at MWC
More and more home broadband subscribers are choosing 5G FWA as the preferred broadband service (in particular in North America) – and now Airties and Qualcomm are teaming up to demonstrate a ‘converged’ solution allowing operators to optimise home Wi-Fi across both LAN and WAN (5G FWA) networks. The solution will be demonstrated at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, next month, Airties says.
The solution is indeed innovative and – as far as we know – unique. “In addition to home Wi-Fi, Airties Cloud can now provide WAN performance data and insights for FWA operators to determine whether they should take corrective actions for 5G CPE, such as frequency band changes, bandwidth provisioning, or switching base stations,” Airties says in a press release here. The solution was announced in December but already discussed at length at Wi-Fi World Congress Geneva in September of last year.
Wireless Broadband Alliance releases first Wi-Fi 7 field trial results
It may seem a little odd that such field trials are going on now that many commercial Wi-Fi 7 service provider networks have already been launched but they do to some extent serve a purpose in comparing Wi-Fi 7 and Wi-Fi 6E in a residential setting, which is exactly what Intel and CableLabs have been testing as part of the WBA’s field trial program.
The WBA says that “Wi-Fi 7 demonstrated significant throughput gains over Wi-Fi 6E, achieving up to 3.7 Gbps downlink throughput with a 320 MHz channel at close proximity.” At typical residential distances the testing showed that Wi-Fi 7 delivers more than 2 Gbps of throughput when the device is on the same floor as the access point, WBA says. More details on the field trial results can be found here.
Plume IQ reveals +233% gaming devices added in December
Plume IQ – the data and analytics service provided by home broadband services platform provider Plume – last week revealed that the number of connected gaming devices grew a whopping +233% in late December (compared to the weekly baseline from 2024). This means the number of gaming devices added to the Plume network (in the US) more than tripled. Nintendo and Sony were the top two providers of wireless gaming gear. Read more here.
/Claus.
