New Wi-Fi standard could speed up existing routers

The Wi-Fi Alliance has announced a standard that could make wireless Internet much faster in the near future. The new standard is part of 802.11ac, which has been around for a while. It is called "wave 2," and some routers might already support it, requiring only a firmware upgrade to take advantage of the new speeds.

Wave 2 doubles the bandwidth available on each channel to 160MHz, which should improve transmission speeds. The new standard will also allow four spatial streams instead of three, a broader 5GHz channel support and Multi-user Multiple Input Multiple Output or MU-MIMO, which permits sending of data to multiple devices at once. The overall effect should be greatly improved Wi-Fi efficiency, enhancing speeds on networks catering to different devices.

The first products being tested with wave 2 come from Broadcom, Marvell, MediaTek and Qualcomm. Since the 802.11ac standard is not new, many routers from China companies already adopt this. However, not all are compatible with wave 2. The good news is that users do not have to wait for 802.11ad to get a boost in Wi-Fi speeds.