Still no standard from the IEEE, and no spec from the Wi-Fi Alliance, but neither is slowing the dash towards .11ac in the least. And that may, surprisingly, be a good thing.
I recently spoke with senior executives at Wi-Fi chip leader Atheros, now of course part of wireless chip leader Qualcomm. The company yesterday announced a broad line of .11ac components, and is currently putting the emphasis on getting .11ac into handsets, a place where the tear-up-the-track 433 Mbps (80 MHz. channel peak, of course) single-stream performance of .11ac will ultimately do a heap of good. Handsets remain challenging territory for multi-antenna designs, so such a marketing direction makes a lot of sense.
My big question, the same as I’ve asked all of the .11ac chip vendors I’ve spoken with in recent weeks, revolves around the fact that it seems very, very early in the development of .11ac for any vendor to be claiming compliance with the standard. Marketing exuberance aside, though, the Atheros executives made a really good point – it’s going to take quite a while for the Wi-Fi certification process to complete – really, on the order of two years from now. But nothing can happen here without some chips to begin working with – so, in fact, it’s not too early for announcement such as this. Atheros believes that the standards-development process is far enough along so that major risks are very minimal at this point, and that any divergence between what’s shipping and the final standard and Wi-Fi spec can be addressed via firmware and/or driver updates. Given the history of the Wi-Fi chip industry, it’s hard to argue with this point.
My other big question revolved around those 80-MHz. channels. What power levels will the regulators allow, given channels that wide? We don’t know. But assuming the FCC requires power density along the lines of what’s allowed for 40-MHz. 802.11n channels, rate-vs.-range for .11ac may be an issue. But no matter – I’m expecting one of the great value-adds in .11ac will be “better n than n” performance in (duh) .11n mode, which is where a many if not most of the .11ac chips produced over the next few years will spend most of their useful lives.
Atheros announced chips aimed at all major applications areas, including, as was noted above, mobile. The WCN3680 is a drop-in replacement for today’s single-stream .11n solution, assuming the use of 28nm Snapdragon chips, anyway. Other announced chips support up to 1.3 Gbps, and Qualcomm actually segments its product offerings across four distinct market segments: mobile, where space is at a premium; computing, including client devices like notebooks and tablets; consumer electronics, including TVs, game consoles, and related devices; and home and enterprise networking, on the infrastructure side. All in all, this is a robust announcement of what will ultimately be an important strategic direction for Qualcomm Atheros and the WLAN industry overall.
I’m still forecasting that we won’t see enterprise-class .11ac products until the second half of 2013, so there need be no rush on the part of corporate IT departments to get .11ac into planning and purchase cycles. .11n, particularly with the recent announcement of so many three-stream products (more on these shortly), regardless has a long and happy life ahead of it. We expect that most .11n infrastructure will still be happily clicking away more than five years from now. But it’s nice to know that the rate of innovation in the WLAN world remains high, and that vendors at the very front of the food chain are hard at work continuing the momentum. And, no, it’s not too early for them.
