Tri-band Wi-Fi chips for multi-gigabit streaming coming from Qualcomm · Chronopin

Tri-band Wi-Fi chips for multi-gigabit streaming coming from Qualcomm · Chronopin

Qualcomm completed its purchase of Wilocity, the startup behind 60GHz “WiGig” (802.11ad) chips, announcing the close the day before the 3 July 2014 report; financial terms were not disclosed, though rumours in May had put the price at $300 million, and Qualcomm Atheros had invested in Wilocity since 2008^[1]
The initial tri-band platform is a reference design based on the Snapdragon 810, “the world's first mobile platform designed to support WiGig”, expected to ship in the first half of 2015^[1]
By Mobile World Congress on 2 March 2015 the Snapdragon 810 had reached a commercial smartphone, LG's newly released G Flex 2, which Qualcomm demonstrated with its X10 LTE modem and Ericsson infrastructure at Category 9 LTE-A speeds of up to 450 Mbps — bearing out the first-half-2015 expectation^[1][4]
Neither Qualcomm press release of 2 March 2015 mentions WiGig, 60GHz or tri-band: the connectivity release covers LTE-Advanced carrier aggregation, LTE-Broadcast, LTE/Wi-Fi convergence, LTE-U and a Qualcomm Atheros smart bulb, and the other previews the Zeroth cognitive computing platform and the Snapdragon 820^[3][4]
The Qualcomm Atheros Wi-Fi silicon shown at that MWC was the QCA6174 2-stream 802.11ac chipset, in NETGEAR's new AirCard Category 9 mobile hotspot built on the Snapdragon X12 LTE modem — again 5GHz 802.11ac rather than the 60GHz WiGig of the tri-band plan^[4]
Dell had already released a wireless dock using Wilocity chips, connecting a laptop to USB storage and up to two monitors^[1]
Note the date gap: the pin is dated 2 March 2015, the day of the two Qualcomm MWC press releases, while the article announcing the Wilocity purchase and the tri-band platforms is dated 3 July 2014^[1][3][4]

Notable features

Qualcomm will combine Wilocity's 60GHz chips with its own Wi-Fi chips into tri-band platforms covering 2.4, 5 and 60GHz^[1]
60GHz signals are easily blocked, so sender and receiver must be in the same room; WiGig is technically capable of 7Gbps, Wilocity's early chips reached 4.6 Gbps, and a 4.6Gbps smartphone chip was expected to ship that year^[1]
The Snapdragon 810 (MSM8994) at the heart of the reference design has eight cores - four 1.958 GHz Cortex-A57 and four 1.555 GHz Cortex-A53 - with an Adreno 430 GPU, dual-channel LPDDR4 memory and support for a 55 MP camera and 4K video capture at 30fps^[2]
Netgear's Nighthawk X6 AC3200 “Tri-Band” router claims 3.2Gbps combined but uses one 2.4GHz and two 5GHz bands with no 60GHz; Qualcomm-based routers should beat it, “although not until next year”^[1]