Broadcom today announced that they’ve come up with an 802.11n wireless antenna for cell phones. What’s more, it’s an all-in-one design incorporating WiFi, Bluetooth and an FM tuner. Not good enough? Well, how about the fact that it’s also got a low power draw, giving us these benefits without draining the battery.
Of course, there’s been no mention of integrating this into the iPhone just yet, but the possibility is definitely there for integration into a future model, especially as they’ve already addressed the battery issue, which seems to be Apple’s primary concern in almost every level of iPhone planning.
Don’t get too excited, though. Even if an iPhone with this chip were to come to market, you wouldn’t be likely to see a massively faster web browsing experience on the phone. Mobile browsers (yes, even Safari) just don’t have the power to utilize that kind of speed. That’s why you don’t get the same Wi-Fi speeds on your iPhone now that you do on a computer using the same connection. The benefits to the iPhone would be the addition of the integrated FM tuner, less chance of interference between WiFi and Bluetooth, due to the chip’s built-in prevention against that very issue and it may even open the possibility of Apple bringing us an OTA syncing option, long clamored for by iPhone users.
One other ancillary benefit could actually be a faster internet connection for your Wifi-connected computers. N-Routers typically support the previous generation standards; 802.11a, b & g. Very few, however, have a separate antenna that allows for simultaneous use of two of the standards. So if you’re packing an 802.11n connection in your house, when you connect your iPhone (or any other a, b or g device) to that network, the speed for the entire network is throttled to the speeds that the lowest-bandwidth device can handle. So if your iPhone is set to auto-connect to your home network, you’re slowing down everything connected to it. That’s why I stick with 3G unless I’m using a feature that specifically requires WiFi, such as the Remote app or the iTunes Music Store. If we got this chip, I could turn my iPhone’s WiFi back on with no worries.
Broadcom states that they will be moving to “significant production quantities” in 2009. The full press release is [here].
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