Wi-Fi 6E products have been available for less than a year, but MediaTek said today it is hosting the “first live demos of Wi-Fi 7”, through its Wi-Fi 7 Filogic connectivity portfolio.
The Wi-Fi Alliance is still at work creating the standard, but explains it will provide max throughput of all least 30GBps – a huge leap from Wi-Fi 6’s 9.6GBps.
This is the first time a company has claimed to actively use the Wi-Fi 7 technology, which isn’t expected to be readily available until 2023 at the very earliest. Mediatek says it uses the same numbers of antennas as Wi-Fi 6, and has 320 MHz channels, compared Wi-Fi 6’s 160 MHz.
Alan Hsu, corporate VP and GM of the Intelligent Connectivity business at MediaTek claims the company “will have Wi-Fi 7 technology and chips as part of our full connectivity portfolio across our product portfolio, similar to how we do that now with Wi-Fi 6, which is leveraging across product lines like Chromebooks, smartphones, etc.”
“Wi-Fi 7’s advances in channel width, QAM [quadrature amplitude modulation], and new features, such as multi-link operation (MLO), will make Wi-Fi 7 very attractive for devices including flagship smartphones, PCs, consumer devices, and vertical industries, like retail and industrial; as service providers begin to deploy a wider spectrum of hotspots across these market segments,” Mario Morales, group vice president of semiconductors at IDC, said in a statement accompanying MediaTek’s announcement.
