The frustration of dealing with the sometimes painfully slow download speeds of public Wi-Fi while sipping your latte may soon be just a bad memory.
Qualcomm has announced it will soon be shipping new chipsets that use new antenna tech to give Wi-Fi download speeds a kick in the pants - particularly in the oftentimes crowded public spots where the highly caffeinated are crazily competing for bandwidth.
As the popularity of public Wi-Fi has grown over recent years, its performance has suffered as more and more mobile device carriers are attempting to connect at public access points. Throw in two cups of coffee and the frustration level of slow download speed gets pretty high.
"Many of us have had the experience when you're in an airport, for example, and literally a hundred people or more are vying for access through a single access point. In some cases you can be limited to mere kilobits of throughput, if not disconnected," explained Todd Antes, vice president at Qualcomm Atheros.
At the heart of the new chipset is a technology called MU-MIMO (multiuser-multiple-input multiple-output) that Qualcomm explains will help change the short time slots that wireless routers currently use to communicate data. In public access points these short time slots communicate with one user at a time so as more users connect a network quickly gets overloaded and slows to a crawl. Qualcomm adds that with their MU-MIMO technology the network can handle three users at a time, effectively tripling the network's capacity.
As exciting as this sounds, you'll have to deal with slowpoke public Wi-Fi for a while longer as Qualcomm says that since both access points and consumer devices will need to be updated to use the new MU-MIMO tech, that may take until the middle of next year.
So, just take a deep breath and order another frap, but take solace in knowing help is on the way.
