> Realistically, if we're docking next to a monitor
I sincerely hope that the future doesn't involve wires. Incremental improvement will be required to reach that future. This is one of them, so I welcome it.
Wireless can provide power, but currently only at extremely short distances. At which point you need a wire to the device providing the wireless power anyway, so you may as well just plug it in.
Exactly. People asking for more penetration/range are asking for higher power devices that interfere with each other. In an increasingly interconnected and "smart" world, where even doorbells and light bulbs are networked, you really do not want higher penetration. Think it was bad getting interference on your headset when you put something in the microwave? Imagine how bad it would be if everyone had a "smart" home and all of those devices on the block were competing with each other for the same spectrum.
Lower power, lower latency, lower penetration at reasonable bandwidths and lower costs should absolutely be the goal.
That's not to say high penetration wireless doesn't have it's uses, it absolutely does, but those are few and far between in a consumer usecase, especially if you can run an affordable lower power, lower penetration meshnet that doesn't cause interference with your own devices, or with your neighbors.
Within the same room at least, the big catch is that that’s with 16 spatial streams. A more likely 2 streams would top out at 5gbps link rate, and somewhere around 3gbps of real throughput.
Then the only real caveat is that you’re using 2/7 (or 2/3 in the EU) of the allocated 6ghz spectrum, but that’s workable given the range of 6ghz.
Apples to oranges, very different characteristics. WiGig (802.11ad)'s up in the 60GHz band where even the oxygen in the air is absorptive, I think most walls pose big problems. But there's 6 channels of bandwidth each with 2160 MHz of space.
Wifi by compare recently went from 480 MHz of space (5GHz) to 1600 MHz (+6E spectrum) of space available in total. Colossal gain, nearly tripled in bandwidth. But there's still less bandwidth in all wifi than there is in a single wigig channel.
That wifi is making such excellent use of such a relatively limited amount of spectrum is amazing. I'm expecting impressive connectivity even at significantly reduced link budgets.
But as for the point here, about interesting new inter-device connectivity, I agree with both of you. Wigig did have these capabilities, has had interesting video & device shipping for a while now. Alas adoption has been just critically low. VR was basically the only thing that pulled this impressive wigig standard out of the hole it had crawled in to die. No one was building this stuff. Huge loss, huge pity. I really wish we had a lot more experience using wigig like technologies, because to the grandparent posters point, having this massive connectivity capability on tap for everyday consumer & business wifi: it's definitely going to enable intense new streaming & inter-system capabilities. I just wish we'd gotten more of a chance to explore this space more freely in the past 10 years, which is about how long 802.11ad/wigig's been around for.
Sure the concept has been around, but not widely implemented. I participated in a WiGig laptop dock PoC a few years ago - it wasn’t great. Usually throwing more bandwidth at stuff helps.
