Israeli WiFi chip specialist Celeno has unveiled only the second 4×4 MIMO WiFi chipset, and upped its game to keep US arch-rival Quantenna at bay.
Celeno is well known now for its own MIMO implementations, but these were initially based on three radios and sometimes more antennas, which it could choose dynamically. This approach made for really strong video delivery in-home and it landed deals at China Mobile, Deutsche Telekom and Liberty Global on the back of 802.11n.
When Quantenna entered the market with a 4×4 MIMO architecture it gained design wins at AT&T and DirecTV in the US. DirecTV is known to be trialing a set-top box that doesn’t even have a wired connection such as MoCA, because it is so impressed with WiFi’s ability to carry video around a home.
But so far Quantenna has not attained large volume shipments with its chip, despite significant praise for its performance by partners. It just takes a long time, and while it waits, the firm has also come out with an 8×8 MIMO 802.11ac chip, which is in trials. But now its chances of kicking Celeno out of its strongholds altogether seem likely to evaporate and the two will continue to fight it out at greenfield sites on a virtually level playing field (though Celeno is known to be significantly cheaper than Quantenna per chip).
Lior Wiess, Celeno’s VP of marketing, told us: “Our 11ac chips are dual-band and we can now allocate a percentage of the airtime to uplinks as well as to individual SSIDs.” Both of these steps are significant as previously uploads on a WiFi network took priority and were not included in its primitive QoS scheme, and also the infamous bad apple problem appears more regularly in a second SSID configuration. This is where one ‘greedy’ WiFi client uses a disproportionately high amount of airtime either because it is suffering interference or because it is a long way away from the access point and so falls back to a slower modulation scheme.
Celeno unveiled its 802.11ac CL2340, which works across the entire range, covering the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands, in 2×2, 3×3 and the new 4×4 version. The 4×4 chipset will provide increased performance and enhanced home coverage for MSOs and service providers using Celeno’s chips in their home gateways, access points, and set-top boxes.
Celeno also had on show an app for consumers that displayed the QoS control that it now offers to operators. It is set up so that specific devices, for instance a child’s tablet, can be cut off from WiFi by using the QoS layers to deprive it of airtime. It harnesses the vendor’s OptimizAIR 2.0 airtime management technology, which both enables provisioning and dynamic allocation of WiFi capacity when served by the same access point.