According to a recent report from communication media light reading, Wi-Fi 7 is in full swing, and chip manufacturers are racing to develop new standards with higher WiFi throughput and lower latency.
At the same time, broadband service providers are advancing next-generation DOCSIS and fiber-to-the-premises (FTTP) networks. Broadcom is expected to be a major player in the Wi-Fi 7 race. Now, the chip company has released a Wi-Fi 7 “ecosystem” consisting of several different chips (BCM67263, BCM6726, BCM43740, BCM43720, and BCM4398) aimed at the home and enterprise markets.
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Vijay Nagarajan, vice president of Broadcom’s wireless connectivity division, said that Broadcom has demonstrated real-world speeds of over 5 Gbit/s with its chips, and believes that Wi-Fi 7 can support the 2.4GHz, 5GHz, and 6GHz bands at the same time. It is possible to achieve 18.7 Gbit/s or even 25 Gbit/s.
Moreover, Wi-Fi 7 will also put service providers in a better position to match speeds in the home with those supported by the home network. Nagarajan explained: “As we move to DOCSIS 4.0, Wi-Fi 7 guarantees multi-Gig. It’s a good complement to 10G broadband.”
Compared with Wi-Fi 6E, Wi-Fi 7 has achieved a big leap. It will go into a 320MHz channel and drive a more optimized Hertz bitrate with 4096 QAM a big leap from the 1024 QAM that Wi-Fi 6 supports.
Wi-Fi 7 also enables Multi-Link Operation (MLO), a feature that enables simultaneous access on multiple frequency bands, increasing capacity and reducing latency. MLO is “an important feature of Wi-Fi 7you can maximize network capacity,” Nagarajan said.
Nagarajan noted that Wi-Fi 7 promises a hundredfold improvement in latency. He said Broadcom has run simulations of the technology and the latency has been consistently below 10 milliseconds.
Wi-Fi 7 will also support Automatic Frequency Coordination (AFC), allowing 6GHz devices to operate at higher transmit power and support both indoor and outdoor activities (Wi-Fi 6 is limited to low power/indoor use).
Use cases tailored for Wi-Fi 7 include low-latency/high-capacity applications such as VR and AR, and it is also expected to provide the “metaverse” with the necessary speed and capacity to support it.
Broadcom is currently sampling its Wi-Fi 7 chip to “early partners” in the retail, enterprise, smartphone, service provider, and carrier segments. Nagarajan estimates that Broadcom typically has a product cycle of nine to 12 months from the start of sampling the new generation of Wi-Fi chips.
Furthermore, Broadcom appears to have formed partnerships with numerous device makers. These manufacturers include Arcadyan, ASUSTek Computer, Extreme Networks, Netgear, Sagemcom Broadband, Sercomm, Technicolor, and TP-Link, according to the company announcement.
As Wi-Fi 7 goes commercial in the next few months, Broadcom will no doubt have a lot of competitors. For example, Qualcomm unveiled its Wi-Fi 7 subsystem FastConnect 7800 in February, while MediaTek gave a live demonstration of its Wi-Fi 7 technology in January.
MaxLinear, a chipmaker that bought Intel’s home gateway platform division in 2020, has since entered the Wi-Fi “game” with Wi-Fi 7 on its roadmap. Wi-Fi 7 products are in development, according to Will Torgerson, vice president, and general manager of MaxLinear’s broadband division, and the company hopes to have chips ready to participate in Wi-Fi 7 testbeds as soon as possible, which the Wi-Fi Alliance expects to begin this summer. test.
MaxLinear intends to advance the product to help service providers tightly integrate next-generation Wi-Fi into products that support DOCSIS, FTTP, and even fixed wireless access (FWA) networks, Torgerson said. He’s also a proponent of MLO and says being able to have connections coexist on multiple frequency bands will play an important role in lowering latency, extending coverage, and easing network congestion.
“From a product perspective, multilink is probably the biggest differentiator,” Torgerson said. MaxLinear, which competes with Broadcom in the DOCSIS chip market, also believes Wi-Fi 7 offers cable operators and other ISPs a way to improve the management of their customers’ home Wi-Fi networks, Torgerson said.
“We’ve seen a huge push from carrier-controlled Wi-Fi. I think there’s going to be a lot of carrier adoption of Wi-Fi 7,” he said. Torgerson expects Wi-Fi 7 certification testing to begin in 2023 and products to be available in 2024.
While service providers (operators) may wait for certified products before entering the market, Torgerson noted that retail vendors of Wi-Fi equipment often get a head start on the market with pre-certified products.
