Researchers at Huawei's campus in Shenzhen, China, claim their lab trials achieved 10 Gbps data speed using Wi-Fi in the 5 GHz band, potentially laying the groundwork for creation of technical specifications for the next-generation 802.11ax Wi-Fi standard as the successor to today's 802.11ac-based gigabit Wi-Fi technology.
"This important milestone, which delivered data over Wi-Fi 10 times faster than the fastest existing Wi-Fi capability commercially available today, will enable a new era of big data applications by using ultra-fast Wi-Fi technology based on advanced next generation architecture to boost data rates to 10 Gbps," the vendor said.
Huawei's Wi-Fi prototype actually reached a transmission data rate of 10.53 Gbps. The company has been engaged in next-generation Wi-Fi technology research since 2010. Technologies employed to enable higher speeds and more efficiency include MIMO-OFDA, intelligent spectrum allocation, interference coordination and hybrid access. MIMO-OFDA is particularly interesting as it combines multiple antennas with orthogonal frequency division multiple access schemes, which split sub-carriers into separate data streams.
Osama Aboul Magd from Huawei was recently elected to chair the IEEE 802.11ax WLAN standard task group, which was created in March to focus on development of the 10 Gbps Wi-Fi standard. Huawei said ultrafast Wi-Fi could become commercially available from 2018, pending agreement on global standards requirements and sufficient chipset availability.
Huawei did not divulge the number of data streams or amount of bandwidth its researchers used to achieve their 10 Gbps milestone. However, that peak speed may be possible with certain deployments of 802.11ac technology as well.
In April, Quantenna Communications announced plans to roll out what it contends will be the world's first 10 Gbps Wi-Fi chipset. The chipmaker said it has developed a unique architecture to enable 802.11ac 8x8 MIMO configurations, delivering not only 10 Gbps of data speed but universal support for multi-user MIMO (MU-MIMO) clients.
For more:
- see this Huawei release
- see The Register article
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