Quantenna Communications has announced the the industry’s first 802.11ax product called QSR10G-AX. This product is built on Quantenna’s QSR10G Wave 3 Wi-Fi platform and adds support for the draft 1.0 of the IEEE specification 802.11ax standard. The QSR10G-AX solution will support 12 total streams: 8 streams in the 5 GHz band and 4 streams in the 2.4 GHz band. It adds support for downlink and uplink OFDMA (Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiple Access), providing superior network efficiency in dense environments as well as high uplink performance. OFDMA dedicates different sub-carriers for individual client devices. This allows multiple devices to be simultaneously served.
As Wi-Fi usage continues to grow, the Wi-Fi 802.11 IEEE standard evolves to cope with the augmented complexity of Wi-Fi networks. 802.11ax was designed with the goal of increasing Wi-Fi networks efficiency in dense deployments such as multi-dwelling units. In addition, it improves Wi-Fi network capacity and performance in terms of its ability to support more simultaneous clients. Lastly, 802.11ax provides increased speed over 802.11ac. All of these improvements are helpful for businesses, public venues, and also in homes where the number of clients continues to grow due to the proliferation of mobile and Internet of Things devices.
Quantenna was the first company to deliver 4x4 802.11n, 4x4 802.11ac and 8x8 802.11ac solutions. Now they have announced the world’s first 802.11ax Access Point solution. The QSR10G-AX is designed to enable a very easy and fast transition for existing QSR10G customers. The new chipset is pin-to-pin compatible with QSR10G, Quantenna’s Wave 3, 12-stream dual-band 802.11ac and 802.11n access point solution. As a result, customers designing with QSR10G solution will be able to drop in the new QSR10G-AX solution.
The technology, which incorporates the 802.11ax protocol, is a leap forward for Wi-Fi through the access technique of OFDMA. The more flexible, efficient, and adaptive use of the Wi-Fi spectrum enabled by OFDMA will increase the data rates of the QSR10G-AX over current products, while also supporting in a reliable and scalable manner the growth of client devices in dense deployments. The transformative technology of the QSR10G-AX will be beneficial for high-performance Wi-Fi devices as well as emerging applications in the IoT.
Key Features and Benefits:
- Integrated AP chipset for dual-band (5GHz and 2.4GHz), dual concurrent operation and management
- Pin-to-Pin compatibility with QSR10G
- 802.11ax Draft 1.0 compliant
- 12-stream operation
- Supports rich set of interfaces to external hosts such as PCIe Gen3/Gen2, RXAUI, RGMII, and others
- Support 2.4 GHz coexistence interface
- Enable full offload for external host
- Cloud managed
The QSR10G-AX is expected to start sampling in early 2017.
