On Tuesday, Broadcom announced the guts for a new kind of home router that is says will zip information around the house at up to 3.2 gigabits per second, about twice what a current, high-end home Wi-Fi device can do. Broadcom's six stream 802.11ac MIMO platform for home networks has twice the bandwidth of existing 802.11ac routers and gateways.

Broadcom's Intelligent Quality of Service (iQoS) software identifies incoming traffic and allocates bandwidth so that applications like Netflix or YouTube get the highest priority while other applications, like file downloads, run at a lower priority. Broadcom's SmartConnect software automatically ensures that 802.11ac devices in the home are not sharing airtime with slower Wi-Fi devices. This process doubles the performance of all devices in the network.

Broadcom's 5G WiFi XStream is a MIMO platform for home routers that includes six 802.11ac streams and three 802.11n streams that run simultaneously. It features a five core "Penta Core" central processing unit (CPU) made up of two 5GHz radios and one 2.4GHz radio as well as 2.96 GHz processing power.

It also supports recently released spectrum from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) through simultaneous multichannel capabilities in 5 GHz band to enable six 802.11ac streams over 160 MHz of bandwidth.

Broadcom's 5G WiFi XStream Platform is currently sampling and will be in production this quarter.