Wilocity promises smartphones with connection speeds of 4.6 Gbps

The newest, highest-speed incarnation of Wi-Fi networking, 802.11ad, is coming to mobile phones. Wilocity announced Sunday it will show a prototype phone at Mobile World Congress that, with the company’s wireless networking chips, can use the 5Gbps wireless communication links. The company’s upcoming Sparrow chipset for phones will join existing chips that can be used in laptops and tablets, said Mark Grodzinsky, the company’s vice president of marketing.

WiGig chips are starting to creep into laptops, PCs and docking stations, but one of the biggest backers of the new multi-gigabit wireless networking standard is ready to take the next step: putting WiGig into a smartphone. At Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Wilocity took the wraps off its first smartphone WiGig chip, the Wil3600, which it will demo at MWC and start shipping to device makers in the third quarter. Wilocity claims it will support a 4.6 Gbps connection to the phone by tapping into the ultra-high-frequency 60 GHz airwaves.