Mobile World Congress has yet to officially start but some of the new technology is already starting to trickle out. Wilocity, who is one of the major backers behind the WiGig standard has just announced it’s very first WiGig chip for smartphones. It plans to demo the chip at the event, and if all goes well and according to plan for Wilocity, they’ll be able to start shipping these WiGig chips to manufacturers by sometime within the third quarter of this year. That might seem like it’s a bit of a stretch goal because we’re only now just starting to see WiGig technology make its way into other mobile devices like laptops, and other platforms like home PCs. Still, Wilocity believes that smartphones are ready to enter the next phase in networking, which is why it’s moving forward with the plans that it has for its wil3600 WiGig mobile chip. According to Wilocity, the wil3600 chip will allow smartphones to access 4.6 gbps connections by using an ultra-high 60GHz frequency airwave.
It’s interesting to think how such a connection would really benefit smartphones. WiGig is designed for super fast, high speed connections to devices within a smaller space. Think about the way you might connect your laptop up to the router at home for an online game. If you’re in the same room as the router the connection is stronger, and will usually result in better speeds, which could result in a better and lag free gaming experience. This is essentially the best scenario for WiGig enabled devices. They are designed to deliver amazing connection speeds, but in return they are gimped by a lower range at which the connection can still function and perform. Think about the Chromecast for example, and how we stream videos to it. This is a great scenario for when connection speeds provided by WiGig chips would come in extremely useful. Casting high quality games from smartphones or tablets to the big screen would also be a perfect scenario for chips like the one Wilocity is looking to implement, because you would be sitting in the same room as the equipment handling your network connections. At current there aren’t actually any commercially ready devices with built in WiGig tech available, but these examples are perfect uses to show why one might want to use a smartphone with that type of technology in it. As reported, WiGig devices will begin to go through certification processes this year, so it’s not too outlandish to think that we might start to see some official WiGig ready devices by the sometime early in 2015.