Qualcomm has introduced a new line of hardware for the next version of the wireless standard, Wi-Fi 7. Called “Immersive Home Wi-Fi 7 Platform”is specially designed to work in mesh networks and promises faster speeds and lower latency than that provided by current standards.
Perhaps you have not yet had the opportunity to discover the advantages of Wi-Fi 6 that we have been reviewing in the product reviews with this interface. Or those of its extended variant Wi-Fi 6E, which is even less adopted. But the technology industry does not stop for anyone and the development of new standards begins a few years before their availability. And even, as in this case, manufacturers (see TP-Link and now Qualcomm) are advancing their solutions before the organization responsible Wi-Fi Alliance publishes the final specifications.
We do know that the new standard will be labeled with the technical name of IEEE 802.11be. The new wireless standard is being developed to achieve Extremely High Throughput (EHT), so we can expect improvements in transfer speeds, lower latency, better handling of connected devices, and spectrum expansion with higher bandwidth channels, that end up determining the data rate of a Wi-Fi signal and ultimately increase performance.
The theoretical data transfer speed of Wi-Fi 7 will be stratospheric compared to the 9.6 Gbps of Wi-Fi 6, up to 46Gbps. The same can be said for the 320 MHz bandwidth, QAM Quadrature Amplitude Modulation of up to 4094 vs. the previous 1024 or twice the number of spatial streams from 8 to 16, and enhancements to MIMO, OFDMA, and Multi-Link Operation (MLO) technology, which aggregates multiple channels in different frequency bands at the same time to improve network traffic, and which is a very interesting property for streaming gaming.
Qualcomm Wi-Fi 7
On that basis, Qualcomm promises “Tri-band Wi-Fi 7 configurations ranging from 10 to 20 Gbps maximum wireless capacity.” The platform will take full advantage of the 5GHz and 6GHz bands with support for 240MHz and 320MHz channels, resulting in more wireless spectrum available for Wi-Fi 7 devices.
According to Qualcomm, Wi-Fi 7 will be able to provide speeds of up to 5.8 Gbps to a single device. Those are incredible speeds for home networks, though as with most router speed estimates, real-world performance will be affected by walls, wireless interference, and other factors. If anything, it can be even higher than what most home Internet service providers offer.
The big goal is that: permanently replace wired local area networks through these wireless connections and in this way run with guarantees some types of applications that until now have not worked properly in wireless networks: remote work, streaming games, cloud computing, virtual/augmented reality or whatever comes in the future. Future of the Metaverse.
As with its mobile processors, Qualcomm will not sell solutions with the new hardware platform, but will offer its Immersive Home 316 Platform, 318 Platform, 326 Platform and 3210 Platform designs to third parties for inclusion in routers and mesh systems. Qualcomm says it has started working with its hardware partners to integrate Wi-Fi 7 into their systems and says we can expect the first solutions to hit the market in the second half of 2023.
