According to Broadcom, you can’t put the Wi-Fi cart before the Wi-Fi horse
Broadcom has further solidified its early-mover status with its announcement of the sample availability of a complete end-to-end chipset offering for the Wi-Fi 7 ecosystem. Spanning routers, residential gateways, enterprise access points and client devices, the new Wi-Fi 7 chips more than double the speed of Wi-Fi 6 and 6E solutions on the market today, the company said.
More specifically, Broadcom’s Wi-Fi 7 ecosystem product portfolio includes BCM67263 and BCM6726, which are optimized for the residential Wi-Fi access point market, BCM43740 and BCM43720, which are optimized for the enterprise Wi-Fi access point market and BCM4398, a highly integrated Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5 combo chip optimized for mobile handset applications.
As Vijay Nagarajan, vice president of marketing for the Wireless Communications and Connectivity Division at Broadcom, explained to RCR Wireless News, Wi-Fi 7 has several features that set it apart from previous generations of wireless technology.
First, he said, its support of 320 MHz transmissions, which is double the 160 MHz of 802.11ax, combined with the use of higher modulation orders, optionally supporting 4096-QAM — up from 1024-QAM in 802.11a — are really what gives you the speed increases.
And then there is high-band multi-link operation. “The broad idea here is to be able to identify for individual devices which channel — whether its 5 GHz or 6 GHz — is best to communicate in terms of maximizing throughput and lowering latencies,” Nagarajan said. “This concept is going to be a key word going forward as people talk about Wi-Fi 7 because it’s a differentiating feature.”
Another critical element of Wi-Fi 7 is the use of automated frequency coordination (AFC), a process established by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to mitigate potential Wi-Fi interference with existing 6 GHz incumbents. Wi-Fi 7 with AFC will bring the flexibility and the range of Wi-Fi in the 5 GHz band, but with 6 GHz performance.
“AFC is native for the [Broadcom’s new Wi-Fi 7] chips,” shared Chris Szymanski, director of product marketing for Broadcom’s Mobile Connectivity Division, which he claimed will create a seamless adoption experience for customers and will “create a huge market draw.”
When taken together, these features, said Nagarajan, enable a Broadcom Wi-Fi 7 mobile chip to provide 5 Gbit/s “in your hands, today.” He acknowledged that maybe you don’t need such speeds; however, higher throughput and faster speeds contribute to overall network efficiency and reduce congestion. Depending on the scenario, he claimed, Wi-Fi 7 improves network capacity by about five times or more when compared to Wi-Fi 6.
“Fundamentally, we believe Wi-Fi improves congested network performance, which is also why we chose to announce this as an ecosystem instead of announcing a mobile chip before our access chips were available for sampling,” Nagarajan continued. “There can’t be a cart before a horse in the case of Wi-Fi. For us to be able to tell the story of Wi-Fi 7, we needed the ecosystem story because it’s all about the congested network in our minds.”
Tiago Rodrigues, CEO, Wireless Broadband Alliance, offered his congratulations to Broadcom for its role in making Wi-Fi 7 chipsets available. “With the availability of Wi-Fi 6E now and Wi-Fi 7 standardizing in the coming years, Wi-Fi broadband connectivity will be the powerhouse for digital growth across enterprises, consumers, carriers, cities and industrial applications,” he said.
Broadcom is currently sampling its Wi-Fi 7 chips to early access partners and customers in mobile, enterprise, service provider and retail segments.
