Qualcomm’s new Wi-Fi chips are meant to rival 5G speeds
Qualcomm is launching a family of chips that can add incredibly high-speed Wi-Fi — at speeds up to 10 gigabits per second — to phones, laptops, routers, and so on. It’s the start of a new generation of this super-fast Wi-Fi standard, but it isn’t going to be used to speed up your typical web browsing. And whether it catches on at all remains an open question.
Right now, Wi-Fi is on the verge of a major change: over the next year, we’re going to start seeing routers, phones, laptops, and other devices add support for something called Wi-Fi 6, which is supposed to make speeds somewhat, but not incredibly, faster than they are now. Weirdly enough, that’s not what we’re talking about here.
Instead, there’s another Wi-Fi standard being...