MediaTek Announces Wi-Fi 7 Access Point and Client Platforms at Computex

[Lightwreather]

Summary

Mediatek was one of the first vendors to demonstrate working 802.11be-compliant silicon under the Filogic lineup in January 2022. As part of the announcements at this week's Computex, the company provided additional technical details along with part numbers. The Filogic 880 platform will service access points, routers, and gateways, while the Filogic 380 will be seen in the client devices.

 

Quotes

WiFi 7 stuff:

Quote

The 802.11 Working Group focused on extremely high throughput when starting work on 802.11be. This has been achieved primarily through a combination of three different aspects:

    Support for up to 16 spatial streams
    Support for channel widths up to 320MHz (with operation in 2.4 GHz, 5 GHz, and 6 GHz bands)
    Support for 4096-QAM (4K-QAM) resulting in better utilization of available spectrum (a faster modulation / coding scheme).

It must be noted that wider channels are available only in the 5 GHz and 6 GHz bands. Theoretically, these aspects allow for up to around 46 Gbps of wireless throughput. 802.11be also aims to enable usage of Wi-Fi for real-time applications by including features for low-latency communications such as Multi-link operation (MLO). This allows a client and an access point to simultaneously communicate over multiple channels that might even belong to different bands.

The actual SoCs:

-Filogic 880

Quote

Mediatek's Filogic 880 platform services the Wi-Fi 7 access point and wireless router market. Similar to its competitor's offerings, the platform supports all the major Wi-Fi 7 features - 320 MHz bandwidth in the 6GHz band, 4K-QAM, Multi-link operation (MLO), Automatic Frequency Coordination (AFC), and Multiple Resource Units.

The platform supports up to five bands with independent RFICs that communicate with the Filogic 680 Wi-Fi 7 baseband chip. While traditional routers may use only three bands, mesh systems and premium routers can make use of the support for two additional bands. At the heart of the reference design is a 1.8 GHz quad-core Cortex A73-based WiSoC. It also includes a network processing unit (NPU) with hardware-accelerated QoS and tunneling offload engines. The WiSoC doesn't include an integrated switch, though. Designs are expected to adopt an external switch to translate one of the two 10Gbps USXGMII ports to either a single 10GbE, or a mix of NBASE-T and Gigabit Ethernet ports. Various other high-speed I/Os are also available in the WiSoC.

The Filogic 880 platform's WiSoC is fabricated in a 6nm process. According to Mediatek, this delivers significant power efficiency compared to its competitors (without public knowledge of the fabrication process for Qualcomm's and Broadcom's offerings and/or public availability of their platforms, this claim is difficult to evaluate).

-380

Quote

On the client side, Mediatek is announcing the Filogic 380 combo solution with support for Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.3. This combo single-chip solution is also built on a 6nm process. The 2x2 solution supports speeds up to 6.5Gbps with dual-band dual-concurrent operation. 320 Mhz bandwidth, 4K-QAM, MLO, and MRU are supported.

Mediatek also indicated support for an extra receive antenna to improve performance and range for Bluetooth 5.3 connectivity by enabling MRC (multiple receive combining). Bluetooth LE audio is also supported. The Filogic 380 also includes coexistence technology to ensure that BT and Wi-Fi can both operate in the 2.4GHz band without interference. Host connectivity is either via PCIe 4.0 x1 or USB 3.0.

Mediatek is currently demonstrating both platforms at Computex 2022. Based on Mediatek's claims, it appears that routers and APs based on the Filogic 880 should hit very attractive price points without sacrificing anything in terms of performance or  features. Products based on the new Filogic platforms should start appearing in the market within a few quarters.

My thoughts

So, this is interesting. Mediatek has done their work and has now released more information regarding their WiFi7 platforms and from what I can tell, it seems to be pretty good. They haven't given much (or any) word on Pricing and availability. Anandtech seems to be expecting a full release before the end of the year and certainly before the end of the next. I'm less optimistic on the pricing of the routers carrying this chip as there will almost certainly be an early adopters' tax but considering this is mediatek, I wouldn't be that surprised should they hit a lower price point. Ofc, the main question is when we might see devices capable of using wifi7's features will arrive.

 

Sources

AnandTech

Mediatek: Press Release, Product pages: 880, 380

[Arika]

See, now that's nice and all, but is there any actual use case where this would get saturated and where the application wouldn't just be using ethernet/fibre optic connections?

 

I'm all for more bandwidth, but at what point is it just for the sake of "make number go up"?

[pas008]

2 minutes ago, Arika S said:

See, now that's nice and all, but is there any actual use case where this would get saturated and where the application wouldn't just be using ethernet/fibre optic connections?

 

I'm all for more bandwidth, but at what point is it just for the sake of "make number go up"?

money for upgraditis?

[Doobeedoo]

Wireless tech advances in the meantime I'm on 20Mbps speed.

[Rauten]

45 minutes ago, Arika S said:

See, now that's nice and all, but is there any actual use case where this would get saturated and where the application wouldn't just be using ethernet/fibre optic connections?

I'm all for more bandwidth, but at what point is it just for the sake of "make number go up"?

Large commercial surfaces? The kind that offer free WiFi to their users.

[Levent]

Cant wait to make popcorn with this thing.

 

 

 

[da na]

2 minutes ago, Levent said:

Cant wait to cook popcorn with this thing.

 

 

 

Don't even need a microwave anymore. Just put food near the router! 

[Levent]

3 minutes ago, Mel0nMan said:

Don't even need a microwave anymore. Just put food near the router! 

Joke aside, these things might need to be very powerful when it comes to RF and processing power if they are going to be processing 40Gbits of traffic. I bet we will see active cooling on APs and routers more often.

[Vishera]

1 hour ago, Arika S said:

See, now that's nice and all, but is there any actual use case where this would get saturated and where the application wouldn't just be using ethernet/fibre optic connections?

 

I'm all for more bandwidth, but at what point is it just for the sake of "make number go up"?

Even a high end Wi-Fi 5 setup is more than enough.

My 3x3 router and my 4x4 Wi-Fi card can easily do 1Gb/s.

 

[Quackers101]

older demo

 

routers for the end of 2022 to start of 2023.

[LAwLz]

4 hours ago, Vishera said:

My 3x3 router and my 4x4 Wi-Fi card can easily do 1Gb/s.

I doubt that.

If you want over 1Gbps of throughput on that you need 256-QAM, 80MHz channels with barely any interference, a 400ns guard interval, and a coding rate of 5/6. Plus you'd have to be completely alone on the network.

Unless you live alone in a bunker and sit right next to your router, or use something silly like 160Mhz channels, you won't be getting 1Gbps. It might say it negotiates a >1Gbps link, but it's not what you will actually get in real throughput. 

 

 

 

6 hours ago, Arika S said:

I'm all for more bandwidth, but at what point is it just for the sake of "make number go up"?

I think all the new exciting things in Wi-Fi 7 are the ones aimed at making the connection more predictable and stable, not necessarily just faster.

 

I honestly think the flashy speeds of Wi-Fi 7 is just for show. Support for 320Mhz wide channels for example is quite frankly stupid. In the EU, the 6GHz spectrum is "only" 500Mhz wide, so with just two networks running at 320MHz channel width you start getting interference problems.  I live in a pretty small apartment house and my phone, with its weak antennas, are picking up 11 different networks. 320Mhz channels should just not be a thing. They will do more harm than good. 

The US got way more spectrum in the 6GHz spectrum, but it's still only enough for 3 non-overlapping 320Mhz channels.

 

The higher modulation (4096-QAM) is stupidly high as well. I doubt anyone will actually get a stable connection at that modulation. The range will be terrible and it will require way too clean of a signal to be practical. It will be very sensitive to interference. It's just for show.

 

Or well, it MIGHT be useful in some niche scenarios. Like maybe ad-hoc connections (like transferring files between two phones) where both devices are using very low transmission power and as a result won't interfere with other devices. 

 

16 spatial streams seems overkill as well. It's more practical and useful than the bigger channels and more precise modulation, but 8x8 access points are already stupidly expensive (well over 1000 dollars each). 

 

 

The cool things about Wi-Fi 7 are, in my opinion:

1) Multi-link operation (aka MLO), which is when you transmit and receive data over multiple channels. So you can use both 2.4GHz and 6GHz at the same time for example. This will of course increase peak throughput, but I think in practice the biggest impact will be that your connection is more stable. You will no longer have to jump to a different band if there is sudden interference on one band. You will just smoothly prioritize the other, more stable band, that you are already connected to. As a result you will get a more stable connection and consistent speed.

It helps keep the latency lower, and reduces jitter.

I believe the spec even has an option for sending the same frames over multiple channels, if reliability is more prioritized than throughput.

 

2) Multi-RU (aka, "puncturing" aka "MRU"). MRU allows a single client connected to a single access point to "puncture" a channel in 20Mhz increments. This means that if you got an 80MHz channel and you get a 5MHz wide interference right in the middle of your channel, your device will no longer cut the channel down to 20MHz. It will be able to avoid just the 20Mhz channel where the 5MHz interference is located, and as a result you will have 60MHz to send and receive data on. So instead of losing 75% of all your bandwidth because of a tiny bit of interference, you will only lose 25%. This makes the connection way more stable and predictable.

Arista showed a good visual representation of this in this video.

 

3) Deterministic low latency - A bunch of functions for making latency more predictable, at the expense of high throughput. Probably won't be used in home equipment, but really nice for stuff like industrial applications (and maybe VR and game streaming).

One of these features is called "restricted target wake time", which allows the access point to allocate exclusive access to the medium at specific time slots. In normal Wi-Fi, a client will send data when it wants, and hope that nobody else sends at the same time (which would cause a collision). This means that the delay between various frames can be quite big.

With restricted TWT, the access point can tell all connected clients "nobody is allowed to send data for the first 0.1 seconds every second, except this fire alarm". As a result, the fire alarm knows that it will always be able to poll some sensor every second without delays. In the old system, it would try and poll the fire alarm every second, but because of other devices sending data it might take the fire alarm 1.2 seconds to actually get the data (if it was delayed twice).

Of course, Wi-Fi does not operate in 0.1 second intervals, nor will the time slots be allocated in this particular manner, but it should give you a general idea of how it works.

TL;DR: Devices gets a more stable connection. Not necessarily faster or lower latency, but the variance in latency can be reduced for specific devices.

 

 

There are also some multi-access point coordination features that sounds interesting, but there is very little info about them so I am not sure if they are exciting or not, or how they work.

 

 

 

Honestly, outside of MLO, Wi-Fi 7 is basically just an iterative improvement on Wi-Fi 6.

Wi-Fi 6 was a much bigger change, where they reworked large potions of the protocol and added a ton of features. This is mostly more of the same, plus MLO.

[Vishera]

10 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

If you want over 1Gbps of throughput on that you need 256-QAM, 80MHz channels with barely any interference, a 400ns guard interval, and a coding rate of 5/6.

I actually get more than 1Gb/s,my setup is very high end,and in fact i have 1024-QAM.

I am not alone on the network but there is very little interference between the router and my PC (there is a clear line of sight)

[Quackers101]

57 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

The higher modulation (4096-QAM) is stupidly high as well. I doubt anyone will actually get a stable connection at that modulation. The range will be terrible and it will require way too clean of a signal to be practical. It will be very sensitive to interference. It's just for show.

 

Or well, it MIGHT be useful in some niche scenarios. Like maybe ad-hoc connections (like transferring files between two phones) where both devices are using very low transmission power and as a result won't interfere with other devices. 

 

16 spatial streams seems overkill as well. It's more practical and useful than the bigger channels and more precise modulation, but 8x8 access points are already stupidly expensive (well over 1000 dollars each).

yeah a lot of tech claims that might not be used in practice, or routers that are underkill for it or having overheating issues, or bad placement or connection.

But a nice point might be devices being used to share or transmit data, or it was at some point talked about devices being an AP in a network?

57 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

Honestly, outside of MLO, Wi-Fi 7 is basically just an iterative improvement on Wi-Fi 6.

Wi-Fi 6 was a much bigger change, where they reworked large potions of the protocol and added a ton of features. This is mostly more of the same, plus MLO.

when we had 6E, very E.

now with scary location tracking and motion tracking data.

 

nom nom, chips

https://www.qualcomm.com/products/technology/wi-fi/fastconnect/fastconnect-7800

intel talk about wifi 7 and "beyond". for those interested.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGR-1QruLQc

Edited May 26, 2022 by Quackers101

[Ydfhlx]

1 hour ago, LAwLz said:

I live in a pretty small apartment house and my phone, with its weak antennas, are picking up 11 different networks.

My phone picks up 35 different networks on 2.4GHz and around 7 on 5GHz. It's so bad that 2.4GHz has lower practical range than 5GHz, so I turned off 2.4GHz altogether.