Qualcomm buys startup Wilocity, bulks up on speedier Wi-Fi tech

[Dietrichw]

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Qualcomm on Wednesday announced it bought startup chipmaker Wilocity to help it provide a speedier, but shorter-distance flavor of wireless technology in more devices.

 

Wilocity, based in Sunnyvale, Calif., and founded in 2007, develops chips using a newer type of Wi-Fi called WiGig that runs on a relatively high radio frequency, at 60 gigahertz. WiGig, an industrywide standard backed by the Wi-Fi Alliance industry group, offers speeds several times faster than traditional Wi-Fi, but is only effective at short distances, so could work well within a single room.

 

WiGig is seen as a potential replacement for physical cables still necessary to connect devices such as tablets or PCs to large displays or televisions. In stating its goal to eliminate cables from all PCs by 2016, Intel pointed to WiGig as one of the potential answers. Qualcomm likewise recognizes its importance.

 

The capabilities of Wilocity's chips make them useful for heavy-lifting functions that can take place in a small area, such as streaming 4K video from a smartphone to a television with minimal lag, or wirelessly docking a tablet to a large display, keyboard, and mouse.

 

Wilocity's chips enable speeds of 4 to 5 gigabits per second, while traditional Wi-Fi speeds are counted in hundreds of megabits per second, Qualcomm's Conroy said.

[JAKEBAB]

Wow awesome about time AC took ages to come out and isnt all that fast hopefully this will push competition.

[Dietrichw]

Wow awesome about time AC took ages to come out and isnt all that fast hopefully this will push competition.

And the short range can be seen as an advantage in dense areas where normally you have a bunch of WiFi connections interfering with one another. even a 3-4 meter range for the most common areas you are in then it can switch back to legacy WiFi standards at longer ranges 

[Plasma]

this could be the new bluetooth 

[JLCitadel]

I'm excited to see where this goes. Looks to be the next step in connectivity