From The Verge: Qualcomm is launching a family of chips that can add incredibly high-speed Wi-Fi — at speeds up to 10 gigabits per second — to phones, laptops, routers, and so on. It’s the start of a new generation of this super-fast Wi-Fi standard, but it isn’t going to be used to speed up your typical web browsing. And whether it catches on at all remains an open question.
Right now, Wi-Fi is on the verge of a major change: over the next year, we’re going to start seeing routers, phones, laptops, and other devices add support for something called Wi-Fi 6, which is supposed to make speeds somewhat, but not incredibly, faster than they are now. Weirdly enough, that’s not what we’re talking about here.
Instead, there’s another Wi-Fi standard being updated, something that’s not meant for the day-to-day use of getting internet at your home or favorite coffee shop. This type of Wi-Fi is meant for very specific purposes, like replacing a virtual reality headset’s data cable with a high-speed wireless link — you can think of it more like a single-purpose wireless cable, than a traditional Wi-Fi connection.
Wi-Fi has already been used for this purpose for the past couple years, using a wireless technology called WiGig. WiGig relies on a connection standard known as 802.11ad, which can hit speeds up to 5 gigabits per second over close to 10 meters, according to Dino Bekis, the head of Qualcomm’s mobile and compute connectivity group.
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