Qualcomm announced that it has acquired Wilocity, a company that develops advanced Wi-Fi technology.
Wilocity is among the first to adopt WiGig, which is 60GHz Wi-Fi based on the IEEE 802.11ad standard. The 60GHz technology works with regular Wi-Fi by creating zones of high-speed connectivity that boost speeds into the multi-gigabit range. Qualcomm plans to create tri-band Wi-Fi radios that support 2.4GHz, 5GHz, and 60GHz. Many of today’s high-end smartphones support dual-band Wi-Fi, which is 2.4GHz and 5GHz.
In addition to acquiring Wilocity, Qualcomm said it will add WiGig to the Snapdragon 810 processor for mobile devices. According to Qualcomm, the Snapdragon 810 will be the first chip to support WiGig, and it will be capable of supporting 4K video streaming, peer-to-peer content sharing, wireless docking, and other high-capacity applications. Qualcomm believes WiGig will be important in relieving traditional cellular networks down the road by allowing them to offload cellular data traffic to WiGig.
Qualcomm did not disclose the terms of the deal, nor did it say when it expects the Snapdragon 810 to appear in consumer devices.
