Although Intel gave up making router and gateway products back in 2020, the company remains the world’s largest manufacturer of computer WiFi modules. Now news from South Korea suggests that Intel’s first WiFi 7 products will be available in 2024, about a year after the first WiFi 7 routers and gateways are expected to hit the market.
According to Eric McLaughlin, vice president of Intel’s wireless solutions division, who attended a press conference in the Asia-Pacific region, Intel “expects it to be present in major markets by 2025”. This suggests that we could see competitor products well ahead of Intel in notebooks and PCs by the end of 2024, as Broadcom, MediaTek and Qualcomm have already announced several products.
But the WiFi 7 standard is still only at an advanced stage of development, with another round of draft hardware specifications coming later this year or next, and the final WiFi 7 specification is not expected to be approved until 2024. So Intel’s thinking is that it would rather be later than its competitors, but wants to launch a fully functional product.
Intel’s product supports speeds of up to 5.8GHz, although the fact that this will use 320MHz wide channels and 4K QAM means that these speeds will be limited to a few meters from the router.
WiFi devices have often had a dark history of quirky compatibility issues between different brands in their development history, and even problems so severe that falling back to older standards hasn’t solved the problem, always a hassle for consumers, so hopefully WiFi 7 won’t repeat history.
