By Claus Hetting, WiFi NOW CEO & Chairman
Spectrum launches ‘Invincible Wi-Fi™’ cellular and battery backup
This week Spectrum launched their latest innovation designed to keep all your devices connected even if a storm or other disruption disconnects you from your landline network. Invincible WiFi™ connects to Spectrum’s Wi-Fi 7 gateway as a companion unit delivering up to 8 hours of battery backup while acting as a cellular modem. “Invincible WiFi™ means you can continue with movie night, businesses can take payments, and students can finish their homework even if the lights go out. Through wind, rain and snow, our customers can count on Spectrum Internet to be there when it matters most,” says said Dave Rodrian, Group Vice President, WiFi Products at Spectrum. Invincible WiFi is available to both residential and business customers, Spectrum says. The solution won the WiFi NOW Award for ‘Best In-home Wi-Fi Product’ in December of 2025. Don’t miss Dave Rodrian speaking at Wi-Fi World Congress 2026 in Mountain View, California, on April 13-15 – read more here.
Broadcom announces first Wi-Fi 8 AP solution
This week Broadcom announced “industry’s first enterprise Wi-Fi 8 Access Point and switch solution for the AI Era”. The announcement (which can be found here) sounds a little as if Broadcom has launched an Wi-Fi 8 AP but of course this is not the case. The press release refers to the advent of a chip platform called BCM49438, which appears to be a companion chip to the company’s already announced Wi-Fi 8 chips named BCM43840, BCM43844 and BCM43820. The BCM49438 APU (Accelerated Processing Unit) “combines high-performance computing, networking, and AI acceleration in a single, tightly integrated silicon,” Broadcom says.
Eero launches ‘eero Signal’ cellular backup for mesh routers
Cellular backup for your router is all the rage at the moment – with Spectrum (see above) practically releasing their cellular backup device on the same week as eero. In this case the ‘eero Signal’ is a companion device – basically a USB-C dongle – that plugs into your eero mesh router and immediately uses 4G LTE for backhaul in the event that the fixed line broadband connection to your home should fail and restores you back to fixed backhaul once the disruption is over. The eero Signal hardware is priced at US$99.99 and requires an ‘eero Plus’ subscription that includes 10 GB of backup data at a cost of US$99.99. Alternatively, eero Plus 100 plan is available at US$199.99 and offers 100 GB of backup data. A 5G version will be released later this year, eero says. Eero also this week launched the eero PoE 7, a Wi-Fi AP designed for enterprises and residential properties (read more here) that connects to the eero PoE gateway. Oddly the release blog is dated ‘September 3’ but we believe this is a mistake.
US operators Brightspeed & Sparklight launch Wi-Fi 7
This week the third-largest fibre network operator in the US Brightspeed introduced Wi-Fi 7 across all its gigabit-speed plans from from 1 Gbps through 8 Gbps, the company announced in a statement here. “Brightspeed’s WiFi 7 technology delivers unprecedented speed, reliability and whole-home coverage engineered for ultra-high-bandwidth households that are powering multi-device streaming, gaming, remote work, online learning and smart devices,” the company says. Meanwhile, Phoenix-based operator Sparklight announced their Wi-F7 offering, which in this case is based on eero Wi-Fi 7 mesh routers.
/Claus.
