SkyCross Unveils Line of High-Performance 5G Wi-Fi Antennas

SkyCross, a global designer and manufacturer of advanced antenna and RF solutions, has introduced a new line of wireless networking device antennas operating on the 5GHz frequency and designed to work optimally on the 802.11ac Wi-Fi specification. In fact, the company has even had the line of products undergo testing from Allison Labs to verify that the antennas outperform competing 802.11ac 5GHz products.

“Engadget anticipates approximately one billion devices based on the 802.11ac standard to be operating worldwide by 2015,” said Ben Naskar, chairman and chief executive officer of SkyCross, in a statement. “We have designed SkyCross’ Wi-Fi antenna technology to significantly outperform the base standard to ensure market leadership for our router, gateway and set-top box customers, as well as an optimal user experience for end-use commercial and residential customers.”

Indeed, Broadcom has been rolling out its own 5G Wi-Fi products, SoCs rather than antennas, to enable 5GHz 802.11ac Wi-Fi on a range of devices, including PCs, netbooks, tablets and smartphones.

The 802.11ac specification offers multi-station WLAN throughput of at least one gigabit per second or a single link throughput of, at minimum, 500 megabits per second. SkyCross claims that its new Wi-Fi antennas comfortably outperform this minimum.

According to Allison Labs’ vice president of engineering, Chad Meyer, SkyCross’ antennas tested with next generation 802.11ac gateways achieved throughput speeds of around 750 Mbps. SkyCross claims that 750 Mbps is the highest recorded data rate on the Wi-Fi chipset utilized to date, coming close to the maximum theoretical rate allowed by 802.11ac products. Other antenna solutions, meanwhile, have topped out around 500-600 Mbps data rates in rate versus range testing.

While this is certainly a significant achievement for SkyCross, it’s even more significant for consumers. Sure, pretty much any 802.11ac wireless setup should outperform the average Internet connection by a large margin, but for local network file transfer and streaming purposes, more speed is always necessary.