“Get ready to send a thank-you note to students at the University of Washington, where a group of electrical engineers is trying to solve the eternal struggle of Wi-Fi battery drain,” April Glaser reports for Wired. “It’s a problem that’s rapidly getting worse as more and more devices require access to the cloud, not to mention the constant strain of searching for a good signal or boosting a weak one.”
“The student researchers invented a new type of hardware that uses 10,000 times less power than traditional Wi-Fi networking equipment,” Glaser reports. “It’s called Passive Wi-Fi, and it works just like a home router, just more efficiently.”
“To give some perspective, the state of the art in low power Wi-Fi transmissions today consume 100s of milliwatts of power, whereas the technology the student researchers developed consume only 10-50 microwatts—10,000 times lower power,” Glaser reports. “It’s hard to say what this will do for your battery life, because there are so many components in a device that impact that—like the screen, for example. ‘But using Passive Wi-Fi would improve battery life by about as much as turning your Wi-Fi off would,’ said Bryce Kellog, an electrical engineering graduate student at UW who co-developed Passive Wi-Fi.”
Read more in the full article here.
SEE ALSO:
Mossberg: Eero makes Wi-Fi simpler and stronger – February 23, 2016
Li-Fi: 100 times faster than Wi-Fi, tests prove – November 25, 2015
Juniper Research: Wi-Fi to carry up to 60% of mobile data traffic by 2019 – June 16, 2015