Charter Says It Will Have draft 802.11ax Router Next Year

[Julio Urquidi]

Service-provider Charter, announced it will be offering 802.11ax routers– a first among broadband service providers.

The newer standard, which is still in draft form and not slated to be finalized until late 2019, is designed to work better in congested areas, particularly in densely populated wireless networks that continue to grow thanks to IoT and smart devices.

Charter's announcement did not include when the 11ax router would be available or the cost of service plans that support it. But a Qualcomm-based four-stream router manufactured by Askey appeared in the FCC database in June.

As with previous new Wi-Fi standards, the potential benefits of draft 11ax routers will be limited until devices that also support 11ax are available. It typically takes one to two years for this to happen.

The company also said it would roll out a "converged" wireless router with licensed spectrum and IoT radios and upgrade existing routers with Wi-Fi Radio Resource Management (RRM) capabilities next year. The latter would use cloud-based analytics to "proactively optimize" a home's Wi-Fi environment.

For more updates, be sure to check out the Charter Communications (now under Spectrum branding) news website.

 

[Razor512]

One thing I wonder about is, is the focus on working better in congested environments, reliant on all of the networks being 802.11ax, or will that work even if the other networks are not on 802.11ax?

 

[thiggins]

One thing I wonder about is, is the focus on working better in congested environments, reliant on all of the networks being 802.11ax, or will that work even if the other networks are not on 802.11ax?

That's mainly marketing-speak. I think they are referring to its MU-MIMO capabilities and maybe OFDMA. Both require 11ax clients to work.

 

[sfx2000]

That's mainly marketing-speak. I think they are referring to its MU-MIMO capabilities and maybe OFDMA. Both require 11ax clients to work.

I think they're going for the 5G play - now that we have pretty much accepted that Carriers are going to leverage the unlicensed spectrum, and Comcast and Spectrum (Charter/TimeWarner) are MVNO's these days...

11ax gives them some headroom...