SAM Daily Times

Much faster Wi-Fi coming soon

The latest Wi-Fi technology, called "802.11ac," offers speeds of up to 1.3 Gigabits per second. That's fast enough to transfer an entire high-definition movie to a tablet in under 4 minutes, share photo albums with friends in a matter of seconds or stream three HD videos at the same time. It's more than double the top speed of the previous standard, known as 802.11n.

Those speeds are theoretical maximums very few people have anything close to 1 Gigabit speeds from their home broadband connection. Average speeds are less than 1% of that. But the faster speeds mean the new Wi-Fi standard will offer a much bigger pipeline for all those videos, songs and games that a growing number of people are streaming on multiple devices simultaneously.

A recent ABI Research forecast predicts that 40% of smartphones will support the newer version of Wi-Fi this year. By next year, the Wi-Fi Alliance expects ac devices to make up the majority of the Wi-Fi market. Even Apple  typically a late adopter with new technologies, has announced that its future products will feature ac Wi-Fi connectivity.

The new standard aims to solve problems like it allows more devices to simultaneously connect to a network without a degradation in performance. It also features lower latency times for streaming music and gaming, where network hiccups and delays can ruin a user's experience. And the latest Wi-Fi standard helps deliver streaming videos more reliably, even when the network is being used by other devices.

As an added bonus, 802.11ac requires devices to have support for two bands of airwaves, which will help to reduce interference. And it requires less power consumption from smartphones, tablets and PCs when they're transmitting data.

Wireless carriers are keeping a very close eye on the new Wi-Fi standard. Cell phone companies are increasingly looking to deploy Wi-Fi hotspots to offload traffic from their congested networks. The new standard offers speeds that are on-par with 4G.