Uptake for bandwidth-intensive services like HD video has been shown to be directly proportional to increasing broadband speeds, which of course makes sense: the better the quality of experience, the more willing users are to embrace the content. Samsung (News - Alert) is now ready to throw down the gauntlet on a new era of connected devices and applications, with the development of super-fast Wi-Fi capable of reaching 4.6Gbps in throughput (about 565mbps).

Yep. That’s about 10 times faster than existing Wi-Fi technologies. To put it in perspective, it’s fast enough to download an entire HD movie in less than three seconds.

Oh sure, there are caveats. For one, the technology is built for the 60GHz unlicensed Wi-Fi band, which has faced significant challenges because its millimeter waves travel by line-of-sight, leading to weak penetration properties and susceptibility to path loss and poor signal and data performance.

Here’s where engineering comes in: A mix of wide-coverage beam-forming antennae and a micro beam-forming control technology that optimizes the communications module in less than 1/3,000 seconds are overcoming some of these issues, Samsung said.

Also, existing Wi-Fi devices operate in the 5GHz and 2.4GHz bands, which are standard around the world. So, the device ecosystem will have to catch up with the network technology before anyone sees real benefit out of the breakthrough. That said, the Korean giant said that it expects commercialization as early as next year to get the ball rolling.

Another issue is the fact that the local network may be lightning fast, but last-mile connections haven’t gotten anywhere close to that—1Gbps over fiber is the leading edge for commercial deployments from operators. So this technology will, for the foreseeable future, be most useful in porting information around a local network.

Accordingly, Samsung plans to apply the new technology to a wide range of products like enterprise audio-visual and medical devices, as well as telecommunications equipment. The technology will also be relevant in situations where consumers “cast” content between devices, to smart home initiatives, and for supporting the Internet of Things (IoT) and machine-to-machine communications.

And conceivably, an enterprising mesh network player with access to a fiber drop could make a go of it from an ISP/carrier Wi-Fi perspective.

Also, let’s face it: real-world Wi-Fi speeds are always less than the theoretical trumpeting would have you believe. But Samsung said that it maintains maximum speed by eliminating co-channel interference, regardless of the number of devices using the same network.

Overall, the company has answers to the objections and is unsurprisingly bullish, “Samsung has successfully overcome the barriers to the commercialization of 60GHz millimeter-wave band Wi-Fi technology, and looks forward to commercializing this breakthrough technology,” said Kim Chang Yong, head of the DMC R&D Center at Samsung Electronics. “New and innovative changes await Samsung’s next-generation devices, while new possibilities have been opened up for the future development of Wi-Fi technology.”

Whether reality lives up to the hype remains to be seen.