Wi-Fi is about to get pretty darn fast. Broadcom's first gigabit Wi-Fi cards are reportedly up to three times faster and six times more efficient than what's out there now.


The new 802.11ac chips are based on 5G WiFi, the next gen Wi-Fi standard. The chips—BCM4360, BCM4352, BCM43526 and BCM43516—use an 80 MHz channel bandwidth that's two times wider than the channel on similar products. That's huge for bandwidth-hungry tasks like downloading HD movies or loading a dozen tabs of horrible offensive pornography at a time.

The chips should have an effect on mobile, too. Content will be downloaded faster, so the chips should let handsets go into low-power mode quicker, which should actually save battery life to the point that turning on LTE doesn't immediately drop your charge by half.


Broadcom will be showing off its 5G WiFi chops at CES, so we'll let you know how it looks from the floor. [Broadcom via Engadget]