At CES this year, Broadcom announced its Wave 2 802.11ac chipset, the BCM4366. It features a 4x4 MIMO configuration, USB 3.0, support for 160MHz channels and is slated for availability in spring 2015. This latest announcement places Broadcom among the top high-speed wireless semiconductor companies offering the newest, advanced feature in the Wi-Fi industry—(Multi User) MU-MIMO. The other leading vendors are Quantenna , Qualcomm and Marvell, each of which have announced 4x4 MU-MIMO solutions targeted at the consumer router, gateway, and enterprise-grade access point markets.
The end user benefits associated with 802.11ac MU-MIMO include reduced latency and improved throughput, increased network capacity, higher traffic load capacity over the network, and the ability to support a higher number of simultaneous users. From a usage standpoint, MU-MIMO allows multiple spatial streams to be assigned to different clients simultaneously, increasing the total throughput and capacity of the WLAN system. Older, single user-MIMO (found in most legacy 802.11n and earlier devices) allowed for the transmission of multiple spatial streams at once, but to only one device at a time.
Questions or comments on this story? Contact peter.brown@globalspec.com
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