Intel today announced that they have joined forces with Broadcom to achieve an important Wi-Fi 7 industry milestone, “The wireless future has arrived with the world’s first cross-vendor Wi-Fi 7 demonstration.
The Wi-Fi 7 cross-vendor demonstration was described as being faster than 5Gbps and based on Core laptops + Broadcom Wi-Fi 7 access points.
Vijay Nagarajan, vice president of Broadcom’s Wireless Connectivity Division, said, “Today’s milestone sends a clear message that the ecosystem is ready for Wi-Fi 7 to bring extraordinary capacity and amazing speeds here, further extending gigabit broadband.”
Intel said Wi-Fi 7 delivers higher speeds, lower latency, higher reliability and greater capacity, including 320MHz channel bandwidth in unlicensed 6GHz spectrum (double the speed), 4K QAM orthogonal amplitude modulation (20 percent faster), multi-link operation MLO (improved throughput, link robustness, roaming, interference mitigation and reduced latency) and improved channel utilization through multiple resource units (MRUs) and perforation.
The Wi-Fi 7 standard has not yet been finalized and its product solution is only a half-baked solution based on the features defined in the IEEE P802.11be draft amendment. Intel allegedly plans to launch Wi-Fi 7 certified products in accordance with the Wi-Fi Alliance certification schedule (2023-2024 timeframe)
In August, Intel mentioned that it was developing Wi-Fi 7 (802.11be) chips in order to obtain Alliance certification as soon as possible, which will be installed in PC products such as notebooks in 2024 and become mainstream in 2025.