First certified mu-mimo routers for WiFi-ac wave 2 hit the market
The Wi-Fi Alliance has started certification of the first routers with support for 802.11ac wave 2. The expansion of the Wi-Fi standard ensures, among other things, mu-mimo presence and the certification ensures that Wi-Fi products can work together .
The 802.11ac standard came in two waves to allow companies to pre-release products before all of the standard’s capabilities could be exploited. The first 802.11ac wave 1 products came out in 2012, and the first wave 2 business and consumer products appeared last year.
However, those products had not yet been certified by the Wi-Fi Alliance, as the testing program for this was not yet ready. As a result, products run the risk that they are not interoperable, although that risk is not that bad in practice. Also in the past, new generation Wi-Fi products appeared before there was a certification program. That program is now available for wave 2 and products that have gone through this can carry the ‘Wifi Certified AC’ designation.
The Wi-Fi alliance is using the following chipsets in testing, which are themselves the first to be certified: Broadcom BCM94709R4366AC, Marvell Avastar 88W8964, MediaTek MT7615 AP Reference Design, MediaTek MT6632 STA Reference Design, Qualcomm IPQ8065 802.11ac 4- stream Dual-band, Dual-concurrent Router and the Quantenna QSR1000 4×4 802.11ac Wave 2 Chipset Family.
The main improvement that wave 2 brings is mu-mimo, which stands for multi-user multiple input multiple output. Mu-mimo works with beamforming to bring several streams to different receivers simultaneously, on a single channel. Su-mimo could only communicate with one client at a time; when connecting to more clients, a router had to switch quickly, which has a detrimental effect on speed, especially with large numbers of clients.
Furthermore, with wave 2, the bandwidth per channel has been increased from 80 to 160MHz, doubling the theoretical throughput rate from 433Mbit/s per data stream to 866Mbit/s. The 802.11ac standard also supports four instead of three transmit and receive data streams simultaneously. Finally, the technology allows for a greater number of available channels on 5GHz, which helps prevent interference.