announced the preview availability of its complete end-to-end chipset solutions for the Wi-Fi 7 ecosystem – covering Wi-Fi routers, home gateways, enterprise access points and client devices.
These Wi-Fi 7 chips more than double the speed of Wi-Fi 6 and 6E solutions on the market today while providing reliable, low-latency, extended-range communications.
Wi-Fi 7, the most powerful Wi-Fi standard yet, will greatly improve the user experience. It doubles Wi-Fi channel bandwidth with the introduction of 320 MHz channels, making it the perfect complement to the expanded worldwide Wi-Fi spectrum in the 6 GHz band. In combination with the upcoming release of Automatic Network Coordination Frequency (AFC), Wi-Fi 7 uses optimal spectrum allocation to enable high-power access points and extends the 6 GHz transmission range indoors and outdoors.
Driven largely by lifestyle changes brought on by the pandemic, demand for high-performance Wi-Fi continues to grow at unprecedented rates, with 60% of consumers upgrading their home Wi-Fi in 2021 and 75% plan to purchase additional Wi-Fi. devices in 2022. With the rise of remote work and growing demand for immersive gaming and streaming, consumers need greater network capacity and stable, deterministic performance.
This makes Wi-Fi 7 an ideal technology for residential customers. 320 MHz channels, along with 4096-QAM modulation, more than double the throughput of Wi-Fi 6E, improve coverage, and keep Wi-Fi performance one step ahead of the broadband speeds that existing technologies DOCSIS 4.0 and multi-gigabit PON bring it to the home. And as emerging augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) applications drive the next generation of the Internet, Wi-Fi 7 supports high speeds and low latency across a large number of devices.
“Broadcom is once again leading the next generation of Wi-Fi with a full suite of Wi-Fi 7 ecosystem solutions. Our Wi-Fi 7 products and diverse customer partnerships continue the accelerating momentum created by the billion Wi-Fi chips -Fi 6/6E that Broadcom has sold over the last three years,” said Vijay Nagarajan, vice president of wireless communications and connectivity marketing. Division of Broadcom. “Wi-Fi 7, with its focus on low latency, high reliability and high-speed communications, is the perfect complement to multi-gigabit broadband technologies while enabling the next iteration of the Internet and AR/VR devices .”
Business and home networks will also greatly benefit from Wi-Fi 7's advanced multilink operation (MLO) capabilities. MLO, which allows devices to aggregate channels and quickly switch between channels, is ideal for congested, high-density networks. MLO enables networks to ensure commercial-grade quality of service and also enables Wi-Fi as an urgent networking technology for industrial and IoT applications. Wi-Fi 7 technology will be key to delivering fast, reliable video streaming and other applications that require reliable speeds in congested environments.
“In addition to higher data rates, lower latency and better network capacity, it is the flexibility of Wi-Fi 7's three-band spectrum, its emphasis on the large 6 GHz band and new techniques like MLO that will greatly improve performance deterministic of Wi-Fi.” said Phil Solis, research director at IDC. “This is valuable for many different types of products and especially for primary devices such as smartphones, which combine data volume and data usage across a wide variety of applications in both consumer and enterprise environments.”
“We predict that within five years, for both the consumer Wi-Fi infrastructure and enterprise hotspot markets, Wi-Fi 7 revenue will exceed that of any other Wi-Fi technology,” said Chris DePuy, analyst at technology from 650 Group. "Wi-Fi 7 takes advantage of the new 6 GHz spectrum. The emergence of 6 GHz is so compelling that we expect more than half of revenues in the consumer and enterprise markets to come from Wi-Fi systems based on 6 GHz devices."
Characteristics
Broadcom's Wi-Fi 7 ecosystem product portfolio includes BCM67263, BCM6726, BCM43740, BCM43720 and BCM4398.
The BCM67263 is optimized for the residential Wi-Fi access point market. Key features include:
- Support for 4 Wi-Fi 7 streams
- Single radio that supports 6 GHz band
- PHY rate up to 11.5 Gbps
- Channel bandwidth up to 320 MHz
- 4096-QAM Modulation
- Multilink Operation (MLO)
- Full compliance with IEEE and WFA Wi-Fi 7 specifications
The BCM6726 is optimized for the residential Wi-Fi access point market. Key features include:
- Support for 4 Wi-Fi 7 streams
- Single radio that supports 2.4GHz, 5GHz, or 6GHz bands
- PHY rate up to 5.75 Gbps
- Channel bandwidth up to 160 MHz
- 4096-QAM Modulation
- Multilink Operation (MLO)
- Full compliance with IEEE and WFA Wi-Fi 7 specifications
The BCM43740 is optimized for the enterprise Wi-Fi access point market. Key features include:
- Support for 4 Wi-Fi 7 streams
- Single radio that supports 2.4GHz, 5GHz, or 6GHz bands
- PHY rate up to 11.5 Gbps
- Channel bandwidth up to 320 MHz
- 4096-QAM Modulation
- Multilink Operation (MLO)
- Full compliance with IEEE and WFA Wi-Fi 7 specifications
The BCM43720 is optimized for the enterprise Wi-Fi access point market. Key features include:
- Support for 2 Wi-Fi 7 streams
- Single dedicated radio for scanning the 2.4 GHz, 5 GHz or 6 GHz bands
- PHY rate up to 2.88 Gbps
- Channel bandwidth up to 160 MHz
- 4096-QAM Modulation
- Multilink Operation (MLO)
- Full compliance with IEEE and WFA Wi-Fi 7 specifications
The BCM4398 is a highly integrated Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5 combo chip optimized for mobile phone applications. Key features include:
- Support for 2-stream Wi-Fi 7
- 320 MHz channel bandwidth
- 6.05 Gbps PHY Rate
- 4096-QAM Modulation
- Multi-Link Client Operation (MLO)
- Compliance with IEEE and WFA Wi-Fi 7 standards as well as the Bluetooth Denver standard
