Broadcom executives at MWC confirmed nowadays that the chipmaker is “beyond the sampling phase and even in a preproduction phase,” according to Michael Hurlston, the company’s senior vice president for wireless LAN, for its two-stream and three-stream 11ac chips. 11ac like 11n uses multiple data streams paired with multiple sending and receiving antennas to accomplish lofty data throughput.

Hurlston said he expects all-embracing OEM products, nearly absolutely access points, routers and the like, to be on sale from Broadcom’s customers by mid-2012. Although the chipmaker hasn’t announced method wins, Hurlston pointed out that the 11ac roadmap announced last month at CES was publicly endorsed by 14 equipment vendors and network providers.

In the booth, Broadcom was running one-, two- and three-stream 11ac radios. The single-stream radio, the type that would be integrated into a smartphone, was delivering usable throughput ranging between 300Mbps and 370Mbps (compared to the underlying PHY rate of 450Mbps), orders of magnitude greater than the 30Mbps-50Mbps, or slightly more, that single-stream 11n can deliver for phones today.

There is a widespread expectation that the additional premium that equipment makers and ultimately end users will have to pay for this improvement is comparatively low. Hurlston estimated that the premium for its 11ac products will be stray from 1.2 to 1.5 times initially. “We exceeded our expectations for that [i.e., for keeping it low],” he said. If the takeup is as fast as many expect, that will rapidly decline.

The three-stream products from Broadcom and rivals like Qualcomm and Atheros will hold throughput of just above 1 gigabit initially.

Qualcomm, with the Wi-Fi expertise and technology from its Atheros acquisition, confirmed it will kick off sampling its 11ac product family sometime in 2012 Q2, according to David Favreau, vice president of product management.

A lot of Qualcomm’s development effort has also involved creating integrated communications processors, marrying Wi-Fi with Bluetooth and other radios, and then tying the effect closely to its Snapdragon applications processor, which powers a wide stray of smartphones today.

Qualcomm’s booth here showed its single-stream 11ac radio, mounted in smartphone prototypes, running in the 220Mbps range, peaking at one point to 247Mbps, in a surrounding Wi-Fi environment, interior MWC’s cavernous Hall 8, that Favreau described as “challenging.”

Enjoy increased wireless coverage for video streaming, online multi-player gaming and more with the NETGEAR Universal WiFi Range Extender (WN3000RP) helping to connect devices including tablets, smartphones and Internet TVs

SAN JOSE, Calif., June 8, 2011 /PRNewswire/ — NETGEAR®, Inc. (Nasdaq: NTGR), a global networking company that delivers innovative products to consumers, businesses and service providers, announces the easy and affordable solution for eliminating wireless dead spots at home: the new NETGEAR Universal WiFi Range Extender (WN3000RP), now available from major retailers worldwide.

A rapidly expanding constellation of Internet-enabled mobile and entertainment devices including tablets, smartphones, Blu-ray players, game consoles, laptops and televisions are connecting to WiFi networks from around the house and even outside on decks and patios. A big driver for this trend is the increasing availability of movies, TV shows and other video through online streaming. Consumers want to watch streaming video on their laptops, tablets and Internet-capable televisions, creating greater demand for strong WiFi connections.

This makes WiFi dead spots more unwelcome than ever, but the answer up to now – running an Ethernet cable through walls and ceilings to add a second wireless access point – has been inconvenient and complicated.

The NETGEAR Universal WiFi Range Extender increases the coverage of home networks by automatically repeating the wireless signal from a WiFi router or gateway.

The extender is a single, compact, self-contained white cube that plugs into any AC outlet. No new wiring is required, and setup takes only a few minutes. When paired with routers that have a “Push ‘N’ Connect” (WiFi Protected Setup) button, the only configuration required is simply pressing the “Push ‘N’ Connect” button on the router and then on the extender.

Dynamic LED indicators on the extender help find the best location for WN3000RP in the home, usually about halfway between the router and the wireless dead spot.

The extender supports 802.11b/g/n and works with all common WiFi security standards including WEP, WPA and WPA2.

“Today consumers are connecting more and more wireless mobile devices and Internet-capable TVs to their networks, from more places in the home. These devices are often used for high-bandwidth activities, such as video streaming and multi-player games, that require rock-solid WiFi connections,” said Damir Skripic, Product Line Manager for Connected Entertainment at NETGEAR. “The NETGEAR Universal WiFi Range Extender makes it possible to enjoy a robust wireless connection in remote corners of the house or outdoors, in places that now have low or no WiFi signal.”

Pricing and Availability

The NETGEAR Universal WiFi Range Extender (WN3000RP) is now available worldwide from major retailers – in stores and online –with a manufacturer’s suggested retail price of $89.99 in the United States.

Based on the report, European states have been encouraged to ban WiFi in schools while citizens have been encouraged to use wired phones. As Ars says, ‘those are pretty radical responses for what remains a purely hypothetical risk.’

As a background, the site points out that almost all the studies that have examined a possible link with mobile phones and cancer have ‘significant methodological limitations, as they rely on things like self-reported usage patterns, which are often unreliable.’

It continues that there’s no evidence to support wireless radiation causing long-term damage to the human body. As the site points out, there’s ‘no well-described mechanism by which non-ionising radiation can induce long-term biological changes, although it can cause short-term heating of tissues.’

The confusion in the Council of Europe’s report, Ars claims, is that there are some papers written on the subject of wireless radiation causing long-term damage to the human body, but the site claims that ‘a careful reading shows that many of these citations are misleading; in some examples, its authors focus on single results from a publication that comes to conclusions opposite to the one being claimed.’

This has led Jean Huss, a member of Luxembourg’s Les Verts, to claim that ‘non-ionising frequencies… appear to have more or less potentially harmful, non-thermal, biological effects on plants, insects and animals as well as the human body even when exposed to levels that are below the official threshold values.’ Ars Technica is scathing in its rebuttal of this view, claiming that ‘Huss has inserted language that suggests future deliberations include a bias towards the same conclusions.’