By Claus Hetting, WiFi NOW CEO & Chairman
According to the established 4-5 year cycle for new Wi-Fi releases the next standard – Wi-Fi 8 – was not expected to happen in earnest until (at the earliest) 2027 with certification expected to begin in early 2028 – but it appears not everyone got the memo. The ink is hardly dry on the Draft 1.0 specification and then yesterday Broadcom announced Wi-Fi 8 chips are sampling. TP-Link says it has successfully performed the first Wi-Fi 8 demo.
Not many were expecting anything Wi-Fi 8 to be released soon but this hasn’t stopped Broadcom from racing ahead and announcing sampling of the first ever Wi-Fi 8-capable SoCs. The announcement was made in a Broadcom blog by Chris Szymanski, Director of Product Marketing & Technology Strategy at Broadcom – the blog can be found here.
Broadcom’s launch includes ‘a full ecosystem of solutions’ meaning disparate chips for residential gateways, enterprise APs, and client devices (for all the details see here). Importantly, Broadcom is also announcing a change in strategy. “We have also resolved to license our IP and products, for the IoT and automotive markets. This allows our quality IP to be used by our partners in markets that are complementary to ours,” Chris Szymanski says in the above mentioned blog.
This is an important change. It may indeed be a little confusing to outsiders to understand how Broadcom is now managing its Wi-Fi portfolio these days in that much of its IP (including Wi-Fi 8) has already been licensed out to Synaptics, including client responsibility for Google’s Pixel phone family. Google Pixel is – as far as we know – the only remaining major client-side device still powered by Broadcom Wi-Fi now that Apple has opted to insource its Wi-Fi platforms (read more about Apple here).
The timing of this Wi-Fi 8 release is still remarkably early although in fairness, Broadcom was first to market with both Wi-Fi 6E and Wi-Fi 7 chips (or at least the first to announce availability). It is unclear but honestly doubtful that competitive chipset providers will follow their lead in short order although MediaTek has been highly active in documenting their approach to Wi-Fi 8 in a series of recent white papers. Qualcomm is of course also among the absolute leaders in Wi-Fi 8.
PHY changes ‘relatively minor’ says analyst
IDC Research Director Phil Solis argues that the reason why it is possible to kickstart evolution to Wi-Fi 8 this early is because required changes in the physical layer are relatively minor. “The changes on Wi-Fi 8 are a collection of many minor changes, not anything drastic like the shift to MIMO with Wi-Fi 4, the shift to OFDMA with Wi-Fi 6, or the shift to the 6 GHz band with Wi-Fi 6E,” Phil Solis says in LinkedIn post comment here.
And he is right. Wi-Fi 8 is mostly about robustness and high reliability but the suite of Wi-Fi 8 features will certainly also improve speed, drive down latency, and extend range. In general companies can of course do what they want but there is the risk that a coherent marketing message on the value of Wi-Fi 8 has not yet been developed by the Wi-Fi industry and that starting early may not – in the end – be a benefit for fast adoption. For more on this topic also see our Wi-Fi 8 webinar here.
Meanwhile – not to be outdone – TP-Link announced the world’s first successful Wi-Fi 8 connection in a statement released on its website here. This happened just three days ago on October 12. TP-Link has “successfully demonstrated Wi-Fi 8 connectivity, transmitting data with a prototype device developed through a joint industry partnership,” the company says. TP-Link doesn’t provide a lot of detail but is clearly intent on a leadership role in Wi-Fi 8. TP-Link – as far as we know – is still the world’s largest producer of Wi-Fi access points by volume.
Late addition to this story: We’re thankful to analyst Dean Bubley for pointing out that another Wi-Fi 8 demo was ostensibly on display at Sercomm’s stand at NetworkX in Paris this week. Sercomm is partnering with Broadcom to deliver what is arguably the world’s first functioning Wi-Fi 8 router (or at least tied for first place with TP-Link, mentioned above). Read the Sercomm release here.
/Claus.
