By Claus Hetting, WiFi NOW CEO & Chairman
Since its inception in 2022 Qualcomm’s FastConnect 7800 first-generation Wi-Fi 7 connectivity platform has powered more than 450 devices – a remarkable achievement – and now the company is taking another aggressive step towards full Wi-Fi 7 market adoption with the FastConnect 7700 released this week. The new second-generation platform is aimed at powering mainstream phones but is arguably only a modest downgrade from Qualcomm’s top-of-the-line FastConnect 7900 introduced at last year’s MWC.
Wi-Fi 7 is widely expected to enter the mainstream everywhere this year and now Qualcomm is doing its part to accelerate adoption: The FastConnect 7700 connectivity platform will likely be powering reams of next generation mainstream smartphones starting in Q2, Qualcomm says.
The new platform is lower in cost partly because it incorporates essential RF components – such as integrated FEMs – and also because it offers a somewhat reduced feature set when for example compared to the FastConnect 7900 introduced last year, Qualcomm says. But when comparing the two platforms feature-by-feature, the new platform really doesn’t seem like that much of a downgrade.
Actually, the easiest way to explain what the FastConnect 7700 is about is by listing the few features it does not support: Dual/High Band Simultaneous Multi-link transmission (read more here) is not a feature of the platform although 320 MHz channel support and MLO certainly are.
That means the platform may not perform as flawlessly as the FastConnect 7900 under certain conditions but will likely do very well a large proportion of the time. The 7700 does include Bluetooth 6.0 but not ultra wideband. And that is all. Other than that the 7700 is really a high-end Wi-Fi 7 connectivity solution for phones and very similar to FastConnect 7900.
“The FastConnect 7700 retains all the most important Wi-Fi 7 features and even includes Bluetooth channel sounding and Wi-Fi ranging for new use cases, such as for locating lost earbuds. We’ve also verified that 320 MHz channel support delivers twice the peak speed of for example the Apple iPhone 16 Pro, which supports only 160 MHz channels. The truth is that we may not always need the gigabit speeds but the associated benefits are lower latency and more available bandwidth for other devices, so in that way speed is still important,” says Javier Del Prado, VP & General Manager of Mobile Connectivity at Qualcomm.
Qualcomm also says the platform’s gigabit throughput matters because it results in higher peak performance everywhere and in particular maintains faster speeds further away from your router or through walls in your home. Add to this that FastConnect 7700 supports AI-enhanced Wi-Fi.
As always Qualcomm will have a formidable presence at next week’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, and – if you’re around – don’t miss a chance to experience how Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, ultra wideband, and AI can work in concert to solve a practical (and somewhat embarrassing) problem for many of us: How to find your car in a large parking lot.
/Claus.
