On the heels of shipping 1 billion Wi-Fi 6/6E chips, Broadcom announced sampling of five chips for Wi-Fi 7 used in smartphones and residential and enterprise Wi-Fi access points to offer much faster speeds and lower latency in wireless connections.
Broadcom on Tuesday listed several expected customers, including Extreme Networks, ASUSTek and NETGEAR. While Qualcomm first announced a Wi-Fi 7 chip, the Fast Connect 7800, for client applications in February, Broadcom said its approach is intended for both client devices and access points to comprise a complete ecosystem.
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Wi-Fi 7 takes advantage of unlicensed 6 GHz spectrum. Also, Broadcom is expecting FCC approval by year’s end of its open Automatic Frequency Coordination application with AFC supported in the new chips, said Chris Szymanski, director of product marketing and technology strategy for wireless communications and connectivity at Broadcom in an interview with Fierce Electronics. Broadcom’s Wi-Fi 7 chips are also expected to be generally available by year’s end.
“AFC is really important for IoT and the industrial internet,” he said. “It offers more power and extends the range both indoors and outdoors.” In the U.S., IoT devices currently suffer under low power restrictions.
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Wi-Fi 7 also allows multi-link operations so devices can aggregate radio channels and rapidly switch between channels, useful for high-density and congested networks with potentially hundreds of simultaneous users crowded into a hospital or stadium.
For industrial IoT applications MLO will allow networks to provide commercial quality of service guarantees. The use of 6 GHz and MLO and spectrum flexibility across three bands—2.4 GHz, 5 GHz and 6 GHz-- will help smartphones in consumer and enterprise uses handle heavy volumes across a wide variety of apps, analysts said.
Virtual reality and augmented reality devices will benefit greatly from Wi-Fi 7’s faster speeds and lower latency. Speeds for smartphones will increase to 5 Gbps, double what is available today. The data throughput is doubled from Wi-Fi 6E, with 320 MHz channels and 4096 QAM modulation.