An exciting wireless future is upon us, as Qualcomm bought a startup called Wilocity. The idea behind this acquisition is to bring gigabit wireless to mobile devices, such as smartphones, tablets, and laptop computers.
Wilocity was founded back in the year 2007, and the goal was to create faster Wi-Fi chips, which are called, WiGig. The technology uses the 60-gigahertz spectrum to transfer files at gigabit speeds over short distances. Such a technology would work wonders in a connected home environment, where everything is in close proximity.
WiGig is capable of delivering speeds faster than traditional Wi-Fi. However, the technology has one major weakness, and that is its ability to penetrate walls as well as Wi-Fi. Because of its limit of transferring data over short distances, WiGig is unable to bring data to devices in certain places of the home.
Furthermore, WiGig is seeing the wireless technology to replace the HDMI cable. This means that in the future, computer users could connect a monitor to the CPU tower by using a wireless connection. The same can be said for future video game consoles connection to TVs or computer monitors.
At the moment, Wi-Fi can only deliver speeds up to hundreds of megabits per second while WiGig can deliver speeds up to 5 gigabits per second. But as we mentioned above, the downside to WiGig is its inability to deliver data over longer distances.
According to Qualcomm, the plan here is to add WiGig technology in its snapdragon 810 chipset for smartphones and TVs. The company is hoping WiGig will play an important role in the streaming of 4K videos across devices in the home. If this works, we could definitely be on our way to the next generation of sharing content with our loved ones.
"Qualcomm is continually innovating and investing in leadership technologies to drive value for our customers while creating new growth opportunities for our mobile, computing and networking platforms. WiGig will play an important role in Qualcomm's strategy to address consumers' increasingly sophisticated smartphone, tablet and computing requirements to support applications-such as immediate streaming of 4K video and high throughput peer-to-peer communication to enable the next generation of social interactions between users sharing content," according to Amir Faintuch, president, Qualcomm Atheros.
Over the years, Qualcomm and Wilocity have collaborated on several occasions, so it makes perfect sense for both companies to join forces with similar goals at the forefront.
Getting rid of wires is a future we see in the distance. At the moment, Intel is hoping it can revolutionize the PC market by making wireless the center of every PC by the year 2016.
