Intel and Broadcom team up to achieve Wi-Fi 7 milestone

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Eric McLaughlin, vice president of Intel’s wireless solutions group, said at a media event in South Korea last month, that Intel is currently developing Wi-Fi 7 chips and getting certified as soon as possible so that they can be equipped in PC products such as laptops in 2024, and it is expected to become mainstream in 2025.

Intel announced recently that it has completed the industry’s first cross-vendor demonstration with Broadcom, achieving a Wi-Fi 7 milestone with wireless data rates exceeding 5Gbps. In this experiment, a Wi-Fi 7 wireless solution was used through a laptop with a Core processor to connect to Broadcom’s Wi-Fi 7 wireless access point.

Image: Intel

This time Intel and Broadcom provided a complete network, maximizing the potential of Wi-Fi 7, and for the wider Wi-Fi market, Intel said that providing an end-to-end experience is critical, and interoperability testing will help develop testbed products that can be used for official Wi-Fi Alliance certification testing.

“As longtime WBA board members, Broadcom and Intel have been instrumental in pioneering Wi-Fi 6 and 6E. Now they’re leading the way again with Wi-Fi 7, which leverages the rapidly growing availability of 6 GHz spectrum in multiple countries across APAC, EMEA, Latin America and the U.S. Their successful trial is a milestone toward bringing Wi-Fi 7’s double-digit gigabit speeds, ultra-low latency, carrier-grade resilience and other next-generation capabilities to consumers and businesses worldwide. Enterprise and residential networks will also greatly benefit from the advanced capabilities of Wi-Fi 7,” said Tiago Rodrigues, CEO of the Wireless Broadband Alliance.

Image: Intel

Wi-Fi 7 corresponds to the IEEE 802.11be EHT (Extremely High Throughput) standard. On the basis of Wi-Fi 6E, technologies such as 320MHz bandwidth, 4096-QAM modulation, Multi-RU, multi-link operation, enhanced MU-MIMO, and multi-AP collaboration (often called MESH networking) are introduced. These technologies enable Wi-Fi 7 to provide higher data transfer rates and lower latency than Wi-Fi 6E.

Wi-Fi 7 can theoretically support a data transfer rate of up to 30Gbps, which is equivalent to three times that of Wi-Fi 6. It can meet the use of high bit rate 4K/8K video, VR/AR applications, remote office, video conferencing, and cloud computing scenarios.

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