802.11n chipset maker promises 600 Mbps throughput

By Tim Conneally, BetaNews

October 15, 2008, 5:07 PM

Nearly one year ago, a Sunnyvale company called Quantenna announced that it had secured approximately $25 million to begin its development of various "next-gen" wireless technologies. Today, the company is ready to break a big barrier.

Quantenna's QHS 802.11n chipsets have a 4x4 MIMO antenna system with Transmit Beamforming, with the stated goal of being used in the streaming of high-definition multimedia content or in HD IPTV setups.

The company says its chips use the 5 GHz and 2.4 GHz bands simultaneously, along with adaptive vector mesh routing to reduce communication latency. The three chips announced today are the QHS450 (450 Mbps max link speed, 200 Mbps max throughput), QHS600 (600 Mbps/400 Mbps), and QHS1000 (1 Gbps/600 Mbps).

Though the company is touting top speeds that are at the highest end of the 802.11n standard, history has proven that actual performance is quite a different story. Broadcom, for example claims a 160 Mbps ceiling for its N chips, but tests at 70 Mbps and under. Similarly, Marvell, which supplies chips for Netgear and D-Link routers, claims its 2x3 MIMO TopDog has a peak performance of 300 Mbps, but field tests last year showed it to have an average throughput of 8.43-18.92 Mbps.

The real strength of 802.11n, however, is its security and reliability, and Senior VP of Marketing and Development at Pirelli Broadband Solutions S.p.A., Corrado Rocca said in a statement today that Quantenna puts reliability first: "Highly reliable wireless bandwidth is exactly what carriers are looking for. The combination of advanced MIMO features, such as 4x4 radio, transmit beam forming, vector mesh networking, and concurrent dual bands are all critical elements required to achieve an ultra reliable, high speed wireless bandwidth."