Chinese network equipment manufacturer H3C has launched on the market what it says it is the first WiFi 7 compatible router on the market. The news is surprising because it comes well before the standard has a final and definitive version, which is not expected to happen until 2024.
The H3C Magic BE 18000announced last June, uses the same 802.11be wireless protocols that are being developed for use with WiFi 7. H3C claims that the BE18000 can operate in the 6 GHz band and offer a peak transmission speed of 18.443 Mbps. the new extended 320 MHz channels designed for use with WiFi 7, and its design has been made based on Qualcomm’s latest chipset, which in turn is the first designed for WiFi 7 and that the company launched in May.
This release is a sign that the company that has designed and manufactured the router believes that the main technical features of WiFi 7 are already fixed and agreed enough to launch a product, despite the fact that none of the main device manufacturers includes still WiFi 7 compatibility on smartphones or laptops.
The main technical feature of WiFi 7, according to Network World, is multi-link operation, which is basically the ability for an access point to listen and “talk” at the same time. There are two variants of the multilink. The first is toggle, which allows devices to use one channel to receive data and another to send it. The second is simultaneous, and it is a type of multilink in which the devices send and receive on several channels at the same time.
In any case, with this next version of WiFi it seems that there will be options for higher performance, and also for get rid of latency issues. In particular, simultaneous multilinking has a lot of potential to avoid interference that can cause notable latency problems, since connections will be able to change frequencies on the fly to cover a loss of signal in a particular band.
