Quantenna's James Chen: As Wi-Fi in the Home Grows, So Does Demand for Higher Performance and New Services
As Wi-Fi technology continues to advance, it is creating opportunities for network operators to offer new services and improved functionality to meet growing demands for high-quality wireless services in the home. In a podcast for journalists, James Chen, Senior Director of Product Marketing at Quantenna Communications – a Technicolor chipset partner -- describes how the Wi-Fi space is evolving.
According to Chen, the in-home wireless is becoming both more complex and more dynamic.
As Wi-Fi technology continues to advance, it is creating opportunities for network operators to offer new services and improved functionality to meet growing demands for high-quality wireless services in the home. In a podcast for journalists, James Chen, Senior Director of Product Marketing at Quantenna Communications – a Technicolor chipset partner -- describes how the Wi-Fi space is evolving.
Podcast Interview with James Chen
According to Chen, the in-home wireless is becoming both more complex and more dynamic.
"We're seeing the rapid rise of multiple smart phones, iPads and Internet TV and other devices -- to the tune of maybe 15 per home -- with the number growing every day," says Chen. "This poses a unique challenge for delivering performance as well as management of these devices and the data that they generate and consume."
These trends not only contribute to a surge in the amount of data that is flowing through the Wi-Fi airwaves, but also raises questions about how to best manage data and devices to ensure consumers have people have the best possible experience.
The main challenge, explains Chen, revolves around the fact that Wi-Fi is a shared medium. As the number of client devices go up, they compete for "air time" to connect to the home gateway to either transmit or receive data from the Internet. This creates a requirement to manage data and devices through subsystems within the Wi-Fi gateways. In addition, the future also holds new applications that such subsystems will need help to address such as:
• Latency – optimizing the amount of time it takes for data to travel back and forth from the internet to the device – which can impact connectivity, especially for many of the new voice computing applications that use Wi-Fi networks in the home.
• Multi-room synchronized audio streaming – which is a rapidly emerging application requiring high-quality, well managed Wi-Fi.
• New approaches to existing applications -- such as home security -- which use the actual Wi-Fi signal to monitor homes.
These, and scores of other wireless applications, put ever growing demands on Wi-Fi network performance. Quantenna provides Wi-Fi chipsets that deliver high-performance, high-quality Wi-Fi. In this space, the company has been behind a number of industry breakthroughs, including the development of 8x8 802.11ac and 4x4 802.11ac solutions that deliver multiple gigabit per second throughput. The latter chipset is being used in Technicolor's CGA4231 cable gateway to enable multiple client-devices to access network resources over Wi-Fi simultaneously.
"All our solutions allow service providers to ensure that subscribers have access to the air time and speed needed to accommodate all of the client devices in the home. This is the key to ensuring that consumers have access to the content or services they want to enjoy whenever they want to enjoy it," says Chen.
