WiFi Is About To Get A Whole Lot Faster

Only a decade ago, if you wanted to connect to the Internet, you were highly likely to be forced to plug into an ethernet cable. As well as limiting you to the length of the cable, this also reduced the number of internet connected devices a person could have in a certain area. Luckily, use of wireless internet (better known as WiFi) has made everyone’s lives much easier, and now, WiFi is about to get a huge speed boost.

Researchers at Samsung Electronics have found a way to massively increase the download speed of wireless internet. Current WiFi technology caps the data transfer speed at around 866Mbps, or 108MB per second, however, Samsung claims to have invented a new 60GHz Wifi technology which increases these maximum speeds fivefold.

The new tech, which enables data transmission speeds of up to 4.6Gbps, or 575MB per second, would allow huge files to be shared with ease. For example, the company claims:

“...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…”

In order to achieve this massive increase in download speed, Samsung worked to decrease interference between devices using the same 60GHz wavelength. While previously, the gap between the theoretical maximum speed and the actually speed was quite significant, with this new technology, Samsung was able to bring this down to almost zero.

While there is no word yet on when Samsung plans to bring this technology to market, it claims in a press release that it “looks forward to commercializing this breakthrough technology”. It seems like we will only have to put up with slow WiFi for a little bit longer...