It’s a lot of data traffic to worry about, and that’s where Qualcomm’s mesh networking technology comes in. A new version of the chip maker’s 802.11ax Wi-Fi SON standard, which is already in use by TP-Link, Luma, and Netgear, and others, can be powered by Ethernet cabling and scaled up to an entire neighborhood, the company said.
That’s invaluable at a time when 50 percent of consumers in the UK, France, and Germany use connected devices in three different rooms simultaneously, according to a recent Qualcomm survey. Internet of Things (IoT) and home automation products are an outsized contributor: Gartner predicts that 8.4 billion connected devices will be in use in 2017, up from 31 percent in 2016.
But Qualcomm thinks mesh networks can automatically fix issues, centralize the control of data, media, and IoT devices, and even lay the groundwork for managed connected device services and data analytics.
