Cat9 LTE Qualcomm
WiGig is a technology that has been developed by Wilocity with the help of various industry partners, including Cisco, Marvell and Qualcomm. We’ve been following the company for years and have been able to see their technology develop little by little into a truly mobile technology. They’ve moved from a proof of concept all the way to integrating their technology into laptops and smartphones. From our experience, their laptop technology is far more mature than their mobile technology, however they have made significant strides in terms of improving the technology’s performance and usability. They already have their WiGig technology working in some of Dell’s laptops and as a result they’ve got plenty of ideas for using WiGig for docking laptops wirelessly to displays and storage.
The technology itself is a 60 GHz wireless technology which is capable of delivering in excess of 1 Gbps in bandwidth wirelessly as long as it is within the line of sight of the receiver. However, due to the fact that 60 GHz is still a radio technology it doesn’t necessarily have to exactly be line of sight. Its just that 60 GHz does not penetrate walls necessarily well, which isn’t a bad thing nowdays in a world where we actually have so many 2.4 and 5 GHz signals that they’re interfering with each other and affecting performance. WiGig’s primary applications are within the same room, meaning that you can wirelessly connect your phone to your TV without needing to be connected to the Wi-Fi network and having to cover the entire house with a wireless signal for that purpose alone, or sharing that bandwidth with other devices on the network.
This technology will become part of Qualcomm’s technology portfolio and will actually be interesting to see how many of Wilocity’s current partners who are also Qualcomm’s competitors will receive the technology. The reality is that we’ll likely see WiGig become part of Qualcomm’s product stack but they may also still encourage others to utilize their 802.11ad application in order to help the technology grow since its introduction a few years ago. Qualcomm was actually one of the first adopters of WiGig, so they clearly have been happy with the progress of the technology since their inclusion in 2012.
