Qualcomm introduced a new line of hardware for the next version of the wireless standard, Wi-Fi 7. “Immersive Home Wi-Fi 7 Platform”it is specially designed to work in mesh networks and promises higher speeds and lower latency than what the current standards provide.

Perhaps you have not yet had the opportunity to discover the advantages of Wi-Fi 6, which we reviewed in reviews of products with this interface. Or those of its extended Wi-Fi 6E variant, which is adopted even less. But the technology industry does not stop at 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) advance their solutions before the organization responsible for the Wi-Fi Alliance publishes the final specifications.

We know that the new standard will be designated by a technical name IEEE 802.11be. The new wireless standard is being developed with the aim of achieving extremely high throughput (EHT), so we can expect improved transfer rates, lower latency, better handling of connected devices, and an expansion of the spectrum with higher bandwidth channels that ultimately determine data transfer rates. Wi-Fi signal and ultimately increase performance.

Wi-Fi 7’s theoretical data transfer speeds will be stratospheric compared to Wi-Fi 6’s 9.6 Gbps, up to 46 Gbps. The same can be said about the bandwidth of 320 MHz, quadrature amplitude modulation QAM up to 4094 compared to the previous 1024 or twice the number of spatial streams from 8 to 16 and improvements to MIMO, OFDMA and Multi-Link Operation (MLO ), a technology that aggregates multiple channels in different frequencies bands simultaneously to improve network traffic and which is a very interesting feature for game streaming.

Wi-Fi Qualcomm 7

Based on this, Qualcomm promises “Tri-band Wi-Fi 7 configurations ranging from 10 to 20 Gbps of peak wireless capacity.” The platform will make full use 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 deliver speeds up to 5.8 Gbps per 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 may even be higher than what most home ISPs offer.

The big goal is: permanently replace fixed local area networks through these wireless connections and in this way run with the guarantees of some types of applications that have not yet worked properly on wireless networks: remote work, game streaming, cloud computing, virtual/augmented reality or whatever comes in the future. The 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 incorporation into routers and mesh systems. Qualcomm says it has begun 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.