Samsung boosts Wi-fi speeds five times maximum rate

Samsung Electronics said it had developed a Wi-fi technology that could boost data transmission speeds by five times the maximum rate possible with existing consumer electronics devices, Bloomberg reported.

The 60GHz Wi-fi technology will enable a 1GB movie to be transferred between devices in less than three seconds while allowing uncompressed high-definition videos to be streamed in real time, the Suwon-based, South Korean company said in an e-mailed statement yesterday.

It added, the technology removed the gap between theoretical and actual speeds, and exhibited actual speeds that were over 10 times faster than with existing Wi-fi technologies.

"Samsung has successfully overcome the barriers to the commercialisation" of the 60GHz Wi-fi technology, Kim Chang Yong, head of a Samsung R&D centre, said in the statement.

"New and innovative changes await Samsung's next-generation devices, while new possibilities have been opened up for the future development of Wi-fi."

The announcement comes as Samsung rolls out new products amid growing competition from Apple and Chinese companies.

The company last week said its quarterly operating profit plunged 60 per cent due to stagnating smartphone sales and had announced a $14.5-billion investment to build a plant in South Korea to meet demand for semiconductor chips.

According to Samsung's statement previous attempts to use the 60GHz band for WiFi had foundered because ''as millimeter waves that travel by line-of-sight [have] weak penetration properties and is susceptible to path loss, resulting in poor signal and data performance,'' The Register reported.

Samsung said, by using ''wide-coverage beam-forming antenna'' and ''eliminating co-channel interference, regardless of the number of devices using the same network'' it had cracked  the problem and that products using its 802.11 ab standard could go on sale next year.

The technology would find early application in ''audio visual and medical devices, as well as telecommunications equipment.'' Samsung further added the technology would be ''integral to developments relevant to the Samsung Smart Home and other initiatives related to the Internet of Things.''

The Register reported that Samsung was painting pretty pictures with scenarios like ''a 1GB movie will take less than three seconds to transfer between devices, while uncompressed high-definition videos can easily be streamed from mobile devices to TVs in real-time without any delay.''

The Register said that was when everything worked well, but just how long that gigabyte took to download to a device on a typical broadband connection – DSL remained the world's dominant broadband medium was not discussed.