It’s becoming increasingly likely that Wi-Fi 7 will become an affordable option next year. This week, Qualcomm joined a list of chip makers detailing Wi-Fi 7 products they expect to be available to homes and businesses soon.
The Wi-Fi Alliance, which develops Wi-Fi standards and includes Qualcomm as a member, said Wi-Fi 7 will offer a maximum throughput of “at least 30 Gbps “and on Wednesday Qualcomm announced the release of Network Pro The Series Gen 3 platform will support “up to 33Gbps”. These are theoretical speeds that you probably won’t reach in your home, and you’ll need a premium broadband connection and Wi-Fi 7 devices that don’t exist yet. However, the speed is an impressive jump over Wi-Fi 6 and 6E at 9.6Gbps.
The next-generation technology is designed for network-intensive applications such as virtual and augmented reality, 4K video streaming and beyond, and cloud computing and gaming. By making changes to the physical (PHY) layer and media access control (MAC), Wi-Fi 7 should allow you to enjoy these applications with less latency and jitter.
Like Wi-Fi 6E, Wi-Fi 7 should be able to use the 6 GHz band, expanding channel width support from 160 MHz to 320 MHz.
Other anticipated benefits of Wi-Fi 7 include multi-channel operation, allowing multiple frequency bands to be used simultaneously. Qualcomm also pointed to 10Gbps enterprise hotspots and up to 500 users per channel.
Qualcomm has announced two tri-band and two quad-band home and business offerings, and the company expects Wi-Fi 7 to hit homes as early as next year, according to Digital Trends. The Qualcomm Network Pro 1620 quad-band variant, which can be used in home mesh routers, offers speeds up to 33.1 Gbps.
Even though the Wi-Fi Alliance has not yet finalized the standard, Wi-Fi chipset makers MediaTek and Broadcom have also marked 2023 as the expected debut date for Wi-Fi 7 and are demonstrating Wi-Fi 7 technologies. Vijay Nagarajan, Broadcom Vice President of Marketing, Wireless and Connectivity, said home availability should be available in the second half of 2023.
“Ultimately, Broadcom Wi-Fi 7 will keep performance one step ahead of the broadband speeds that DOCSIS 4.0 and multi-gigabit PON technologies bring to the home,” Nagarajan said.