If you’ve just upgraded your entire wireless network to Wi-Fi 6E mesh or router, you might want to look away.
Mediatek has announced at Computex 2022 that it will ship its first Wi-Fi 7 platform, with one chip for clients (i.e. smartphones, tablets, computers etc) and another one for the access point (be it a WAP or a router for example).
In comparison, in the UK, the average broadband speed surpassed 50Mbps in 2021 while US broadband users enjoyed average speeds of nearly 100Mbps in 2022, several orders of magnitude slower than what 802.11be, the official name of Wi-Fi 7, can achieve.
Wi-Fi 7 race
Mediatek is at loggerhead with archrival Qualcomm, which showed off its FastConnect 7800 Wi-Fi 7 connectivity chip at Mobile World Congress 2022.
The Filogic platform was announced earlier this year and the Filogic 380 and Filogic 880 are the first members of that family. They can combine to offer speeds of up to 36Gbps (4.5GBps) when using five bands concurrently and when used in tandem, marginally faster than what Qualcomm's competing solution can offer.
The 380 can be used alongside a host processor in a two-chip solution while the 880 incorporates an arm-based application processor and an NPU (Network Processing Unit).
Wi-Fi 7: Is the next generation worth it?
One can question the wisdom of launching yet another wireless technology (albeit a massive upgrade from what’s on the market) when Wi-Fi 6E is slowly becoming mainstream and broadband speeds (whether wired or wireless) are generally slower compared to Wi-Fi.
Gigabit Ethernet connectivity is still the dominant wired technology with 2.5GbE being timidly rolled out in clients, routers, switches and access points. Faster wired technologies (5Gb, 10Gb) remain prohibitively costly despite being the ones that could benefit the most from Wi-Fi 7.
Nevertheless, the use cases put forward by Mediatek underlines the fact that this technology will aim - at least initially - to replace Ethernet connectivity for super high-bandwidth applications like 8K streaming. Given the company’s past record of product launches, an aggressive rollout targeting premium and business products should be expected.
“Our wireless connectivity solutions are designed to deliver the fastest performance using the most advanced technologies, and represent MediaTek’s commitment to drive Wi-Fi 7 adoption in a large number of new markets,” commented Alan Hsu, corporate vice president and general manager of the Intelligent Connectivity business at MediaTek.
This year, Computex is once again virtual, but we'll still be bringing you all the breaking computing news and launches as they happen, so make sure you check out all of TechRadar's Computex 2022 coverage.
