The Smart World Series With SiliconANGLE

Speedy Internet will power the Internet of Things – without it, connected devices will be limited in their ability to cross communicate. Laying the groundwork for its Internet of Things (IoT) initiative, Samsung Electronics announced Sunday a fresh development in their 60GHz Wi-Fi technology to enable wireless transfer speeds of up to 4.6 gigabits per second (Gbps). Data transfer speeds of this magnitude can allow for streaming of uncompressed high definition video to televisions, smartphones and other consumer electronic devices in the home and elsewhere.

Samsung is expected to market the technology as early as next year and plans to incorporate it into a host of products including audio, visual and medical devices. It’s an ecosystem to support Samsung’s own connected devices like their smart refrigerators and televisions, and will also give developers attending Samsung’s IoT-centric Developer Conference reassurance of potential network capacity for future devices and services they may build.

“This idea of connected homes or smart homes is something Samsung has been thinking about for years,” said the head of Samsung’s Open Innovation Center, David Eun, to CNET after their acquisition of the software startup SmartThings earlier this year. SmartThings looks to connect dozens of household items such as garage doors, lights, door locks and more together for a user to control remotely through a smartphone app.

There are some concerns surrounding the 60GHz band, however. One issue is that the wireless signal has difficulty traversing walls due to the short wavelength of the 60GHz frequency, approximately five millimeters. Samsung reports to alleviate this concern to provide a commercially viable solution by implementing “millimeter-wave circuit design and high performance modem technologies” into the 802.11ad Wi-Fi standard.

Samsung has reportedly overcome the other technological challenge of co-channel interference between devices present on the frequency band by the use of wide-coverage beam-forming antennas. This development may prove effective when dealing with a multitude of internet-connected devices on the same network, including potentially dozens of devices connected in a single home generating large amounts of data traffic.