5G, The Future of WiFi

This week we discovered that increasingly, people would rather watch TV shows and movies online, instead of on a television. Nielsen said in its latest report that in the US alone, there are 5 million residences without a cable or satellite TV service. What is more, they don’t even use an antenna to get free signals over the air. At the same time, internet traffic is increasingly going from wired to wireless networks.

The heightened importance of wireless networks, the explosion of video consumption on the web and the growing number of wireless devices being used are all collapsing the classic 802.11a/b/g/n WiFi networks.

But fear not, because there is already a solution to this problem! At the 2012 Consumer Electronics Show, Broadcom released the first 5G WiFi chip. This new WiFi standard, 802.11ac, is  3x faster and 6x more power efficient than previous generations of chips. Since the chip’s release, lots of companies have launched products with this technology such as smartphones, notebooks, PCs and routers. This year’s edition of Apple Mac computers, for example, could have support for this faster WiFi in their upcoming operating system upgrade.

Of course, here at Fon, we always want to make sure we are working with the latest technologies, connecting people to the fastest possible WiFi. That is why some of our newest partner routers are going to include 5G WiFi chips in their hardwares very soon for a better worldwide roaming experience. We are also working on updating our Fonera range to include this latest standard. So stay tuned, big things are on the horizon!

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