When you want really high-speed communications with your smartphone, faster than you can get over a cellular connection, WiFi steps up to meet the task. We’re seeing more phones with expanded WiFi support, including on the 5GHz band, that continue to push the envelope. For Panasonic, though, that’s just not good enough, and the company announced that it’s come up with a WiGig implementation that’s optimized for gadgets like smartphones.
WiGig uses the 60GHz band, well above the frequencies over which smartphones normally communicate. In theory, you could see wireless speeds as high as 7Gbps. That means more high-bandwidth applications are now possible, like streaming very-high-resolution video.
Since your home broadband connection is likely nowhere near the speeds afforded by WiGig, it would be used mostly for local communications. Instead of hooking up an HDMI cable to your TV, you could just connect wirelessly over WiGig.
Panasonic’s chips should be able to pull off these speeds without taking a huge battery toll, a serious consideration for smartphones. The company envisions a usage scenario where its chips would draw less than a Watt during operation. It’s going to show off what it has so far at the International Conference on Communications in Kyoto, Japan from June 5 through 9. There’s no word on when we might actually see its WiGig chips in phones, though.
