Wi-Fi 7 is the next big thing for wireless networking.

Silicon vendor Broadcom announced its second-generation Wi-Fi wireless connectivity chips on June 20, offering the promise of more bandwidth, speed and availability than has ever been available for Wi-Fi before.

Officially also known as the IEEE 802.11be, the specification has been dubbed Extremely High Throughput (EHT) by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers IEEE standards body that has defined all major wired and wireless networking protocols. Wi-Fi 7 is the successor to the Wi-Fi 6 standards officially known as IEEE 802.11ax that were officially released in 2019.

While Broadcom is already building out its second generation of Wi-Fi 7 silicon, there is one key thing to be aware of — Wi-Fi 7 is not yet a ratified IEEE standard. In fact, the IEEE currently doesn't expect that final approval for Wi-Fi 7 will happen until late 2024. That's not an issue, at least according to Broadcom.

"Broadcom's silicon is pre-standard but is forward-compatible with the Wi-Fi 7 standard and will be certified when certification is available," Gabriel Desjardins, director of product marketing in Broadcom's wireless communications and connectivity division, told SDxCentral. "This is consistent with past new product releases."

What is Wi-Fi 7?

As has been the case with every new Wi-Fi standard, the new Wi-Fi 7 brings more speed and capacity. Desjardins said that network administrators will see higher overall network capacity when utilizing Wi-Fi 7.

"A Wi-Fi 7 quad-band AP (access point) has more than 50% higher total throughput than an equivalent Wi-Fi 6E AP, which itself is almost 50% higher than Wi-Fi 6," he said. "They will also see improved latency for critical services requiring guaranteed quality of service."

Wi-Fi 6E is an addendum to the original 802.11ax standard, providing access to the 6 GHz spectrum. With Wi-Fi 7, there is more wireless availability in the 6 GHz spectrum with support for 320 MHz channels. Another key attribute is a capability known as 4K QAM (quadrature amplitude modulation), which provides up to four times more signal density than what is available in Wi-Fi 6.

Desjardins noted that Wi-Fi 7 brings benefits to all bands, not just 6 GHz. For example, multi-link operation will reduce latency even for devices operating only in 2.4 and 5 GHz bands. He added that the 6 GHz band is critical to high-performance Wi-Fi going forward, and is essential for delivering 10 Gb/s broadband to the home over wireless.

"This is the future of Wi-Fi, and it brings with it the capacity you need to make use of the multi-gigabit broadband that's getting rolled out by major operators," Desjardin said. "That's why we've created multiple tiers of Wi-Fi 7 chips [that] can be used in a wide range of end products at a variety of price points."

Broadcom's Wi-Fi 7 silicon

Broadcom's first-generation silicon is already in production and there are a number of access points already announced from vendors including Asus, TP-Link and Netgear.

Desjardins said the new second-generation devices bring Wi-Fi 7 to a broader market. The new BCM47722 and BCM4390 Wi-Fi 7 chips have support for the newest Bluetooth standards, along with Zigbee and Thread for IoT.

"The first deployments are with retail access points, which typically lead the market," Desjardins said. "We expect to see mobile devices and enterprise access points in the market using our first-generation silicon very soon."