A new wireless chip setup jointly designed by Sony and the Tokyo Institute of Technology could push the transfer speeds of wireless routers up by a significant amount in the coming years. The new design combines two chips to drastically improve wireless speeds.
This new wireless design has two chips which combine to push a transfer date rate of 6.3Gbps. To put that number into perspective, it is approximately 14 times faster than what is currently available today. Sony's press release says,
"implementation of this technology will enable users to transmit and receive data at much higher speeds between mobile devices without the need for cable connections. This technology will also enable users to enjoy uncompressed high-quality video streaming from a mobile device to a display."
This means that if this design can be pushed into consumer grade devices, we could have the ability to stream an uncompressed rip of a Blu-ray film from a mobile phone or tablet directly to our TV or media box. The very prospect of that is exciting, but it would mean I would need a whole lot more storage to hold uncompressed rips of films.
The radio frequency chip in this duo was developed by Professor Akira Matsuzawa, Associate Professor Kenichi Okada, and others at the Tokyo Institute of Technology. Sony developed the other chip which is a very low power baseband chip. Sony also oversaw all chip development on the project.
To get a bit technical the RF chip operates millimeter-wave 60GHz band (2.16GHz per channel) which uses 802.15.3c standards. The only issue with this is the range of that standard is significantly lower than those of 802.11n or the upcoming 802.11ac. I would be interested to see what the range Sony promises for this chip is. I can see something like this being useful in a home environment but it might not be as useful in very large buildings if the range is short.
Sony's press release doesn't give any sort of timetable to when we might see this technology make its way to consumer devices. I can't imagine it would be any time in the very near future so until then I'm going to dream of ridiculously fast transfer speeds in my own wireless media setup.
