Wi-Fi has become an indispensible part of day-to-day life. According to the Wi-Fi Alliance, the technology has been incorporated into more than 600 million devices, worldwide. It is an essential ingredient of the home and enterprise, and users have come to expect it in products ranging from smartphones to media players. Already, the average user has four Wi-Fi devices, and the technology is increasingly attractive for connecting a variety of electronic devices throughout the home, even where there isn’t a wired connection available.
With its enormous installed base, Wi-Fi is ideal for the connected digital home, especially with the increased performance specifications in the newly-ratified IEEE 802.11n wireless networking standard. Quantenna’s technology implements an advanced set of optional provisions in 802.11n standard, including 4x4 Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO), dynamic digital beamforming, mesh networking and channel monitoring and optimization. The Quantenna “Full-11n” Wi-Fi product delivery ensures the high quality that consumers expect, and the reliability that service providers demand, including full HDTV video quality with 1080p resolution, anywhere in the home, on devices ranging from HDTVs to video game consoles and networked music receivers.
Strong standards and technology advances are fueling tremendous growth in plug-and-play, fully interoperable Wi-Fi products and services. According to ABI Research, Wi-Fi connections in consumer electronics devices will rise from 113 million in 2008 to more than 285 million by 2012. Altogether, Wi-Fi chipset sales jumped 26 percent in 2008 to 387 million, according to In-Stat, for applications from cellular-Wi-Fi phones and consumer electronics devices to laptops, netbooks and other mobile computing platforms.
Furthermore, In-Stat and the Wi-Fi Alliance have jointly announced that all handheld gaming devices shipped in 2009 will include Wi-Fi, and that, in the handset category alone, sales of Wi-Fi-enabled handsets will grow almost twice as fast as the entire smartphone sub-category. Meanwhile, according to JiWire, the number of public Wi-Fi hotspots around the world grew 400 percent between 2004 and June of 2009, to 258,853. Throughout the worldwide Wi-Fi market ecosystem, this technology’s popularity and availability continues to grow by leaps and bounds. Unlike proprietary technologies, Wi-Fi is supported by a robust industry standardization infrastructure, which ensures interoperability among a growing choice of products that deliver the best possible user experience. More than 6,000 Wi-Fi certifications have been completed, including more than 500 consumer products that have received Wi-Fi CERTIFIED™ 802.11n approval for the latest, advanced Wi-Fi performance.