By Claus Hetting, Wi-Fi NOW CEO & Chairman
Even if you’re an enterprise Wi-Fi connoisseur you probably wouldn’t have guessed it: The new leader in Wi-Fi 7 AP speed is Zyxel Networks. This week Zyxel released their bid for leading the Wi-Fi 7 enterprise networking market with the model WBE660S, which delivers a whopping 22 Gbps of peak data rate. With adaptive antennas and anti-noise shielding, Zyxel’s new AP is surely a contender for the best-performing enterprise Wi-Fi 7 AP.
It will likely come as a surprise for many but this week’s new leader in raw Wi-Fi 7 AP data rates is none other than Zyxel Networks. More than that Zyxel’s new 22 Gbps WEB660S unit comes with plenty of HW and software sophistication under the hood, which means it is likely to perform exceptionally well. The Taiwan-based technology giant released the new Wi-Fi 7 AP this Monday and the unit will be available for purchase late this month, the company says.
As expected the new AP delivers the full package when it comes to Wi-Fi 7 features: 320 MHz channels, 4kQAM, Multi-Link Operation, and Multi-RU puncturing – all of this powered by Qualcomm’s Networking Pro 1220 Wi-Fi 7 chipset. All of this is also fairly standard for high-end Wi-Fi 7 enterprise-grade APs. More remarkable is Zyxel’s insistence on adding value with their own unique vision on how to push the enterprise Wi-Fi performance envelope.
Smart antennas & hardware innovations
What stands out in particular is Zyxel’s smart antenna technology, which is a clever way of shaping antenna radiation patterns dynamically to optimise connectivity for each client. Zyxel says the system selects the best of 700 possible antenna patterns for each client every 100 milliseconds.
This – for example – steers signals away from sources of interference and drives up performance, Zyxel says. The adaptive antenna solution has been part of Zyxel’s AP technology for a while but is likely to take on new importance with Wi-Fi 7, Zyxel says.
“Smart antenna technologies begin to excel when we start pushing the boundaries for Wi-Fi performance for example with 160 MHz and 320 MHz channels in Wi-Fi 7. In this case we know that adaptive antennas can reduce co-channel interference and also improve coverage as a result of increases in signal gain. As enterprises start using wider channels, smart antennas will become increasingly important,” says Kevin Drinkall, Director Marketing & GTM Strategy EMEA at Zyxel Networks. The WBE660S incorporates three 4 x 4 smart antennas supporting all of 2.4, 5, and 6 GHz bands.
Zyxel has also gone out of their way to include anti-noise shielding components into their HW design as well as additional shielding to minimise interference from 4G and 5G cellular networks.
The latter hardware innovation has over the past few years become the HW design standard for Zyxel Networks APs as are RF filters eliminating potential performance-reducing interference between various Wi-Fi frequency bands. The company says its hardware innovations have a clear and measurable impact on performance. “Anti-noise shielding allows us to squeeze several dBs of SNR more out of our units with corresponding performance benefits. And we know Wi-Fi APs can be susceptible to cellular interference. We’ve practically done away with that,” Kevin Drinkall says.
The company says the new unit is up to five times faster than their previous Wi-Fi 6/6E generation APs. Zyxel Wi-Fi networks can be managed via Zyxel Networks’ Nebula Cloud, which offers a long list of enterprise-grade management and security features. Taiwan-based Zyxel Networks was spun off from affiliate Zyxel Communications in 2019 and the company says it has shipped more than 100 million network devices to over 1 million businesses worldwide.
/Claus.
