The first Wi-Fi 7 demos will show up at CES in January, with the new technology potentially leapfrogging the wide availability of Wi-Fi 6E in the market, MediaTek execs said today.
“We are going to participate in Wi-Fi 7 technology. We want to be the leaders, and the metaverse will be ours,” James Chen, Associate VP for Product Marketing, joked at a company event.
Wi-Fi 6E adds a new frequency band to Wi-Fi 6 and has just started to appear in very expensive routers, like Netgear’s $600 RAXE500. And “I don’t see prices coming down any time soon” for Wi-Fi chipsets, said MediaTek’s Director for Global Public Relations, Kevin Keating.
“The cost increases we’ve experienced over the last 18 months are unlike anything I’ve seen in 24 years in the business. There will be granular smaller reductions in certain segments, but I think we are in the new norm,” Keating added.
Wi-Fi 6E receivers are already starting to appear in premium smartphones, and MediaTek announced a number of new Wi-Fi 6E chipsets at the event. But if Wi-Fi 6E routers remain super costly, Wi-Fi 7 may come up quickly on its heels.
The official adoption of Wi-Fi 7, also known as 802.11be, is technically years away—Wikipedia says it’ll be in early 2024—but it looks like chipset makers are getting a jump on it. Along with MediaTek, Intel and Qualcomm have committed to the new standard, although they haven’t said they will show products soon.
Chen said Wi-Fi 7 will bring major improvements over 6E. One is in speed. “If you use the same number of antennas as Wi-Fi 6E on a Wi-Fi 7 product the speed increase is 2.4x,” he said. “From Wi-Fi 6 to 6E there was no increase; we just operated a new band.”
The technology’s “multiple resource units” aspect will let Wi-Fi 7 networks better fight off interference from other networks nearby. “We can puncture out noise from your neighbor,” Chen said, but for now, there are no hard dates for the arrival of Wi-Fi 7 equipment.
