By Claus Hetting, WiFi NOW CEO & Chairman
CES: MediaTek announces & demonstrates Filogic 8000 Wi-Fi 8 platform
At CES today, MediaTek became the second major Wi-Fi chipset vendor to announce sampling of Wi-Fi 8 products. MediaTek says the new Filogic 8000 family will deliver ultra-reliable Wi-Fi 8 connectivity “across a diverse array of product categories to enhance a wide variety of AI-driven products and applications.” Read the full press release here. The company is demonstrating the new platform at CES this week.
Commercially available Wi-Fi 8 devices and services may still be a couple of years out – but that’s not stopping the major Wi-Fi chipsets vendors from jostling for position within the emerging Wi-Fi 8 market and MediaTek is certainly not pulling any punches in that respect.
The company points to the following marquee features of Wi-Fi 8: Multi-AP coordination, spectrum efficiency and coexistence, better performance at range (including seamless roaming), and optimisation features to deliver improved latency and higher reliability (also read more here about MediaTek’s approach to Wi-Fi 8). MediaTek continues to be deeply involved in the Wi-Fi 8 standardisation work and has issued a number of white papers highlighting the company’s differentiating features (read more here and here). In addition to expanding their strong presence in Wi-Fi chips for client devices, the company has in recent years boosted its market share significantly particularly in the broadband gateways and enterprise AP segments.
CES: Japan’s Vision Inc. launches ‘Global WiFi’ service for international travel
Also at CES: Japan’s Vision Inc. has launched what they say is a next-generation service for international travel connectivity. The new ‘Global Wi-Fi’ service combines eSIM with an extensive roaming network including ‘Cloud-native’ Wi-Fi, access to the mobile networks of 160 carriers, plus a single dashboard for unified management. From the sound of the press release (read it here) it sounds like Vision is using some form of a curated Wi-Fi network as their footprint but this is not entirely clear. Also not clear if there is some form of Wi-Fi auto-connect involved.
Boundless Devices appoints new CEO, licenses Motorola brand
The iconic consumer electronics brand Motorola is back, now under the auspices of Irvine, California-based Boundless Devices. The company has licensed the brand and released their first Wi-Fi 7 mesh product – dubbed the Motorola Q15 Mesh Wi-Fi 7 BE3600 Router – in October of last year (read more here) as well as a DOCSIS 3.1 cable modem supporting carrier plans of up to 2.5 Gbps. Then last month, Boundless Devices appointed David Henry – previously of NETGEAR – as new CEO.
“We’re relaunching the brand worldwide and we believe we have the right technology and team to make a real impact on the market,” he says. David Henry has previously held the position as President of the Consumer Division at NETGEAR, where he led the transformation of the company into a market-defining leader, introducing iconic product lines including Nighthawk, Orbi, and Armor, Boundless Devices says.
CES: Broadcom launches three more Wi-Fi 8 platforms including AI accelerator
At CES this week Broadcom continues its streak of Wi-Fi 8 launches with three new chips: The BCM4918 Wi-Fi 8 APU – the ‘Accelerator for the AI edge’ – as well as BCM6714 and BCM6719 with integrated dual-band Wi-Fi 8 Radios. The BCM4918 is a next-generation system-on-chip “designed to unify high-performance computing, networking, and AI acceleration in a single, tightly integrated silicon,” Broadcom says while the dual-band BCM6714 (three spatial stream 2.4 GHz radio + four spatial stream 5 GHz radio) and the BCM6719 (four spatial stream 2.4 GHz radio + four spatial stream 5 GHz radio) complete what Broadcom calls ‘the unified Wi-Fi 8 platform’.
Broadcom’s first launch of an ecosystem of Wi-Fi 8 solutions happened at NetworkX in October of 2025 and included three 6 GHz-capable platforms for residential (BCM6718), enterprise (BCM43840, BCM43820) and client devices (BCM43109). Also read more here. Samples of the BCM4918 APU and the two new dual-band Wi-Fi 8 devices, the BCM6714 and BCM6719, are available to early access customers and partners, the company informs.
/Claus.
