By Claus Hetting, WiFi NOW CEO & Chairman
This week Wi-Fi chipmaker MediaTek continued its multi-pronged attack on the global CPE market with a new Wi-Fi 7 hardware reference design. This time the company is targeting the growing community of cablecos and telcos committed to the RDK open source CPE platform. As far as we know the announcement by RDK Management and MediaTek marks the world’s first Wi-Fi 7 reference design for the RDK-B platform.
Shortened time-to-market, pooled resources for software development, common de-facto standards: There are plenty of reasons for telcos and cablecos to adopt the RDK open source software platform for CPE development. And now there’s one more: This week MediaTek released the world’s first RDK-B reference design for tri-band Wi-Fi 7. The announcement comes ahead of Network X in Paris, France.
“We want to make sure that cablecos and telcos have every opportunity to be first-to-market with world-leading Wi-Fi 7 router and gateway solutions, and in particular we want to reiterate our continued strong commitment to supporting the RDK community. Our new Filogic 880 based reference design means service providers can begin developing Wi-Fi 7-capable RDK CPEs today and quickly move to deployment,” says James Chen, VP Product & Technology Marketing at MediaTek.
The tri-band 4×4 MediaTek Filogic 880 SoC powers the new Banana Pi-based RDK reference hardware to the tune of 36 Gbps (peak) Wi-Fi 7 data rate and incorporates all the signature Wi-Fi 7 features including single-chip MAC MLO, multi-resource units (MRU), 320 MHz channels, and more. Perhaps most importantly Filogic 880 of course supports 6 GHz operation.
“RDK-B – including our new reference design – is an essential software platform for operators because it allows them to focus on developing the best services and applications as opposed to spending loads of time and resources on creating chipset drivers and other software. RDK is a way to get ahead and deliver service value to broadband subscribers fast,” James Chen says.
Over the past years RDK has expanded its community to include more than 600 members including vendors, developers, integrators, and not least service providers. RDK software is currently deployment on more than 100 million devices, RDK Management says. RDK-B – the broadband version of RDK – provides core functions such as Wi-Fi, device management, telemetry, Ethernet access and supports all network access technologies including DOCSIS, GPON, DSL, and FWA.
RDK Management was founded in 2013 by Comcast and Time Warner Cable and is today a joint venture between cable giants Comcast, Liberty Global, and Charter. In recent years the RDK stack has been adopted by an increasing number of telcos, famously including Deutsche Telekom in 2021. RDK Management introduced RDK for Broadband or ‘RDK-B’ in 2014 as a unified Wi-Fi management component for gateways, APs, and mesh extenders.
MediaTek has recently made significant inroads into the telco market including major deals with AT&T and Verizon for 5G FWA CPEs with many more deals in the pipeline for the rest of this year and 2025, the company says. Read more here.
/Claus.
