By Claus Hetting, Wi-Fi NOW CEO & Chairman
Apart from a few shining stars – such as Qualcomm’s remarkable FastConnect 7900 platform and Intel continuing to work with Meta for desktop VR – MWC 2024 was probably a little underwhelming as far as Wi-Fi is concerned. We scraped the news and here’s what we found.
Vantiva demonstrates new Wi-Fi 7 home broadband extender
Vantiva says it now ‘takes the top provider position for home gateways and set-top boxes’ as the result of the acquisition of CommScope Home Networks earlier this year. The company demonstrated their first Wi-Fi 7-capable gateways last year, and at this year’s MWC Vantiva is extending its Wi-Fi 7 portfolio with the ‘Eagle X3’ tri-band Wi-Fi 7 extender. The unit is “one of the first carrier-grade extenders on the market to leverage all advanced Wi-Fi 7 features, such as broader channel widths and multi-link operations, improving the quality of user experience,” Vantiva says. Read more here.
ZTE launches more than ten Wi-Fi 7 ‘LinkPro’ CPEs including ‘world’s fastest’
Chinese vendor ZTE may have felt it’s time to catch up with the competition at MWC 2024 – because ZTE used the event to introduce their new ‘LinkPro’ CPE family including more than ten CPEs and APs featuring nearly every configuration under the sun. The LinkPro series includes Wi-Fi 7 CPEs for GPON, XGS, DSL as well as mesh APs and routers. Intel says the new family is designed for homes as well as SMEs. ZTE says a couple of its products are specifically designed for European markets and that it will be providing new Wi-Fi 7 CPEs to customers in Spain, Italy, Turkey, and Japan. Read more here.
The company also took the opportunity to claim top spot as world’s fastest Wi-Fi 7 gateway (we’ve have not confirmed if this is true) with their BE19000 XGS-PON tri-band gateway. ZTE says the real-life speed delivered by the new gateway exceeds 14 Gbps. More here.
Qualcomm adds Wi-Fi 7 to its Snapdragon Auto Connectivity Platform
Wi-Fi for the auto industry is not something we cover very often – but we probably should because new auto connectivity chips from for example Qualcomm are delivering increasingly important functionality to the driving experience and to driving safety. Qualcomm is already (as of last year) working with top automaker brands such as Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) and BMW. This year at MWC 2024 Qualcomm added Wi-Fi 7 capability to it’s already highly capable automotive chipset platform. Qualcomm calls this ‘the world’s first automotive-grade Wi-Fi 7 platform’ – read more here.
/Claus.
