By Claus Hetting, WiFi NOW CEO & Chairman
Wi-Fi 8 is supposed to be all about reliability as opposed to raw speed – but that hasn’t stopped Qualcomm from releasing a new family of Wi-Fi 8 networking platforms featuring a set of performance specs well beyond those of previous generations. This week at Mobile World Congress the company released no fewer than five new AI-native Dragonwing networking SoCs covering every application and market segment. Granddaddy of them all is the NPro A8 Elite delivering a peak capacity of 33 Gbps to 1500 clients, Qualcomm says.
If you think the next generation of Wi-Fi is not going to be about speeds and feeds – then it is time to think again. In general it is true that the Wi-Fi 8 standard aims to improve reliability as opposed to raw PHY speeds. But the intelligent Wi-Fi silicon vendor – in this case Qualcomm – knows that a generational upgrade to Wi-Fi 8 is likely to need a stronger set of incentives than simply a set of reliability-boosting features. Precisely that strategy was on full display at MWC Barcelona this week.
This week Qualcomm released a whopping five new Wi-Fi 8 networking platforms including the top of the range Dragonwing NPro A8 Elite – all of them of course AI-native. Qualcomm is using the generational shift as an opportunity to combine AI with Wi-Fi 8 capabilities (including all the new reliability features) as well as a new 5 x 5 (up to penta-band) radio architecture supporting as many as 20 antennas. Overall the new NPro A8 Elite promises to boost throughput by as much as 40% at typical distances while reducing latency by a factor of 2.5 compared to previous generation products, Qualcomm says.
“Our new Wi-Fi 8 portfolio is really all about building the connectivity foundation for the AI era, which means our platforms now include our Agentic AI engine powered by the Qualcomm Hexagon NPU. In addition to radio performance enhancements, we’ve also included power optimisation modes that reduce energy consumption by up to 30%. And as always the new platforms will run on RDK-B and Prple middleware making it easy and fast for service providers to introduce their services on the new Wi-Fi 8 Dragonwing platforms,” says Ganesh Swaminathan, VP & General Manager at Qualcomm.
Serving all market segments
Qualcomm points out that on-board AI processing of course will continue to be used to boost Wi-Fi connectivity performance including at the application level while also providing the basis for a host of new on-gateway multimodal AI-based services including for example voice recognition, face recognition, Wi-Fi sensing, context-aware automation, and more.
The Dragonwing NPro A8 Elite is built for high-performance enterprise access points and premium home routers – and if you think its capabilities might be a little more than you need, Qualcomm also released Dragonwing N8 system aimed at mainstream mesh and home routers. The N8 – which also offers tri-band 5 x 5 or split 2 x 2 plus 3 x 3 architecture – delivers up to 23 Gbps peak wireless capacity with support for up to 750 simultaneous clients, the company says.
Also included in the portfolio released this week is the Dragonwing FiberPro A8 Elite, which is really the NPro A8 Elite with 10G PON access added and the (5G) FWA Gen 5 Elite. The latter is the fifth generation of combined 5G FWA and Wi-Fi platforms designed for home broadband services, now featuring Wi-Fi 8. Finally this week’s product launch includes the Qualcomm Dragonwing F8, which is the N8 with PON access added for mainstream fibre deployments.
For additional clarity also see the new Wi-Fi 8 networking SoC lineup in the graphic below and the rest of the product details here.
/Claus.
