By Claus Hetting, Wi-Fi NOW CEO & Chairman
Plume white paper: Saving on Wi-Fi energy consumption equivalent to 1,240 cars!
A new white paper by home broadband customer experience provider Plume extolls the benefits of managing the energy consumption of residential Wi-Fi via Plume’s Adaptive Wi-Fi service. In addition to managing home Wi-Fi to deliver the best possible consumer QoE, Plume now also offers energy-savings capabilities on the platform, which means the system is capable of detecting usage patterns and reducing number of active Wi-Fi radios when not needed.
Plume says the feature is available from OpenSync 5.6 onwards and integrated within the HomePass and WorkPass service suites. Plume says the power savings were active for at least 6 hours in 84% of homes within a sample of 3,000 European locations.
Potentially the power savings could be massive: In the case of 1 million installed Plume SuperPod mesh Wi-Fi units, the savings would reach an equivalent emissions of 1,240 cars or 91,070 trees grown over 10 years. For more details download the full Plume white paper here.
Comcast serves up faster Wi-Fi for Xfinity Mobile subscribers
Last week Comcast said it has cranked up the Wi-Fi data rate on 23 million “Xfinity Mobility” hotspots across the US in order to serve Xfinity Mobile and Comcast Business Mobile subscribers with Wi-Fi of up to 1 Gbps. Comcast says 90% of Xfinity Mobile traffic already runs on Wi-Fi – which would seem to suggest that the new Wi-Fi hotspot speed boost could drive that number even higher.
Comcast has named the new service ‘WiFi Boost’ and says it has “invested more than $20B over the past five years to upgrade and expand the Xfinity network and introduce new innovative features.” The company also says it has the largest and most powerful Wi-Fi network in the US. Comcast doesn’t say anything about the location of the 23 million hotspots but we speculate that the majority of these are public SSIDs configured on Xfinity home gateways. A minority may be set up through a similar scheme at business locations served by Xfinity broadband. Comcast says that the service is based on the company’s fibre-based network, which serves more than 60 million homes and businesses. For more details also see the announcement here.
Comcast announced its DOCSIS 4.0 and Wi-Fi 7-capable XB10 Xfinity gateway in February although no word yet when exactly the gateway and associated service will be made available other than 2H24.
NETGEAR unveils new Wi-Fi 7-capable Orbi 970 mesh
Last week NETGEAR launched the Wi-Fi 7 version of its popular Orbi mesh system – and this time, the system has been substantially redesigned. In addition to a slick new form factor, the Orbi 970 comes with a new 12-piece internal antenna design, which NETGEAR says delivers flawless 360-degree coverage to all corners of your home.
NETGEAR says the Orbi 970 features its own patented quadband technology delivering speeds of up to 27 Gbps and ‘Enhanced Dedicated Backhaul,’ which uses both 5 GHz and 6 GHz bands for boosting mesh backhaul speed and reliability.
The Orbi 970 will connect up to 200 devices and is powered by the Qualcomm Networking Pro series chipset (which is typically a platform used for enterprise-grade APs). A three-pack NETGEAR Orbi 970 will set you back a whopping US$2299.99 and is available for order here. As far as we know – and according to the specifications provided by NETGEAR – the Orbi 970 is the fastest consumer mesh Wi-Fi system available on the market today. The new system has already received an excellent review on performance and coverage by TechRadar here.
/Claus.
