By Claus Hetting, Wi-Fi NOW
MediaTek’s Wi-Fi chipsets are probably best known for powering home gateways, phones, and TVs but in recent months the company has captured significant market share in enterprise Wi-Fi by landing major deals with AT&T and Verizon for 5G FWA CPEs. MediaTek says its formula for winning over the enterprise segment is about addressing three specific key concerns: Easy migration to 6 GHz, better security performance, and fielding the most complete product portfolio including solutions for Wi-Fi 7, fibre, and 5G.
Fixed wireless broadband to the home or business using 5G for the last mile is racking up significant market share across the US – and one company that has embraced the right product strategy at the right time is MediaTek. In mid-March Verizon unveiled its new Wi-Fi 7 Business Internet Gateway and then in late March, AT&T launched its AT&T Internet Air for Business solution.
Both are powered by MediaTek and it is no coincidence that MediaTek is reaping its rewards now, the company says. “We’ve been in fibre for more than a decade, and in 5G since the beginning. And we offer one of the best Wi-Fi 7 SoC solutions on the market. The breadth of the portfolio is one major reason why we’re winning business in the enterprise space right now,” says James Chen, VP Product & Technology Marketing at MediaTek.
While the Wi-Fi, 5G, fibre combo is the first component of a winning formula, the second is making sure migration to 6 GHz Wi-Fi easy and efficient. MediaTek’s Filogic 860 Wi-Fi 7 SoC features two 4 x 4 RF ICs that can be configured to support any two of the three available Wi-Fi bands. “The idea is to offer a smooth transition to 6 GHz Wi-Fi by configuring software and firmware on the device as the need for new band combinations arise,” James Chen says.
“Initially 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz might be the right choice of bands while later 2.4 GHz and 6 GHz could be the right configuration as the adoption of 6 GHz end-user client devices expands. Eventually, the two bands of choice could evolve to 5 GHz and 6 GHz,” he says. The company’s Wi-Fi chipset architecture is designed in such a way that changes can be activated in the AP by IT administrators.
The third component of the formula is acceleration of tunneling and security performance. MediaTek’s Wi-Fi 7 AP architecture (in Filogic 880 and 860 SoCs) includes a hardware acceleration engine which entirely offloads the IPSec and tunneling tasks from the CPU.
The result is vastly improved speeds. “We can achieve more than 9X the speed in bidirectional mode when using on-chip hardware acceleration for layer two tunnelling compared to when the CPU has to take on this task in software. It’s a huge improvement which also means you don’t sacrifice speed when for example using IPSec,” James Chen says.
MediaTek was among the first Wi-Fi chipset vendors to announce Wi-Fi 7 products in early 2022 and has since expanded its portfolio with mainstream Wi-Fi 7 Filogic 860 and 360 second generation SoCs in 2023. In January of this year the company announced its close cooperation with the Wi-Fi Alliance to ensure the release of a first wave of Wi-Fi 7 certified products powered by MediaTek’s Filogic Wi-Fi platforms.
/Claus.
