First commercial 802.11ax Wi-Fi carrier gateway gets release

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Qualcomm, NEC and KDDI team up for first commercial launch in Japan

The first commercial carrier gateway based on the new 802.11ax standard will be made available to in Japan later this month.

The BL100HW is based on Qualcomm’s IPQ807x family of chipsets and has been designed by NEC.

The gateway promises a fourfold increase in wireless networking throughput, boosting the efficiency and capacity of routers which have to deal with more bandwidth-intensive applications and ever-increasing numbers of devices competing for connectivity.

802.11ax Wi-Fi

Qualcomm claims its chipsets can support up to 10Gbps WAN speeds and a peak rate of 6.5Gbps on Wi-Fi. The IPQ8072 is the first commercially available 14nm Wi-Fi system on a chip and supports Multi-User MIMO (MU-MIMO) to connect multiple users to a single access point.

On top of that, security is enhanced by the use of the WPA3 encryption standard.

The BL100HW will be made available to Japanese telco KDDI’s home customers later this month.

“Qualcomm Technologies and NEC Platforms have raised the bar in terms of innovation in home connectivity with this advanced and highly-integrated 802.11ax solution,” said Yasuhisa Yamada, deputy general manager, product & customer service sector, KDDI.

“We are looking forward to working with them to deliver the enhanced experiences our customers have come to expect from our services.”

“As KDDI and NEC Platforms continue to push boundaries with this powerful solution, we are thrilled to be partnering with them to revolutionize Wi-Fi connectivity and deliver virtually unmatched performance to their customers,” added Rahul Patel, head of connectivity and networking at Qualcomm Technologies.

802.11ax hasn’t actually been standardised yet and the certification process hasn’t begun. Indeed, this means the tech isn’t expected to be widely adopted until some point in 2019. However, a number of manufacturers have released products ahead of time, including Intel which has detailed its own chipsets.

Qualcomm hasn't announced whether and when the chipset will be available in other products.

Steve McCaskill

Steve McCaskill is TechRadar Pro's resident mobile industry expert, covering all aspects of the UK and global news, from operators to service providers and everything in between. He is a former editor of Silicon UK and journalist with over a decade's experience in the technology industry, writing about technology, in particular, telecoms, mobile and sports tech, sports, video games and media.