Broadcom said Tuesday that it has already begun sampling the first Wi-Fi 8 silicon to select partners, as a precursor for rolling out the first Wi-Fi 8 consumer hardware at a future date.
Broadcom actually announced four different designs — the BCM6718 for the residential access point market, the BCM43109 for mobile handsets, plus the BCM43840 and BCM43820 for enterprise APs — that it will sell as chips as well as license as intellectual property. The sampling process has already begun, Broadcom said.
Wi-Fi 7 is already well established in both PCs and handsets across the world. That Wi-Fi 7 technology, launched in 2023, is still being worked on: Intel’s Panther Lake laptop processor, for example, includes Wi-Fi 7 Release 2 support, which works toward better communication between your PC and the access point to reduce latency and increase the overall performance.
That’s the whole point behind Wi-Fi 8, which broke cover in late 2024 and is set to be formally adopted probably by late 2028. That’s never stopped wireless chip vendors, however, which tend to put as much as they know of the specification into silicon as soon as they can to start landing design wins with customers just as soon as possible.
It’s probably not a coincidence that the latest Wi-Fi 7 standards are transitioning into the overarching guidelines behind Wi-Fi 8: To improve the quality and reliability of Wi-Fi 8 wireless connections, rather than just improve performance. Wi-Fi 8 still can transmit data at up to a hypothetical, optimized speed of 23Gbps, according to rival Mediatek, but Wi-Fi 8’s most important technologies are essentially all qualitative, focusing on ultra-high reliability. Broadcom cited key features which included inter-AP coordination, which allows APs to target signal beams at devices to improve connectivity; and multiple ways of avoiding congestion. Wi-Fi 8 is also designed to extend the range of Wi-Fi, though Broadcom didn’t cite specifics.
Broadcom said that the increasing ubiquity of AI, and the constant, high-bandwidth streams of data back and forth between devices and the cloud, necessitate Wi-Fi 8. In an interesting twist, each of Broadcom’s Wi-Fi 8 chips includes a hardware-accelerated telemetry engine, which “collects real-time data on network performance, device behavior, and environmental conditions, serving as a critical input for AI models.”
Broadcom said that the telemetry engine can be used for optimizing the quality of the Wi-Fi expercience, or running “predictive maintenance” or to strengthen security.
Broadcom’s BCM6718 for residential access points includes a 4-stream radio, packet scheduler, and telemetry engine, along with advanced eco modes and digital pre-distortion to reduce power. Broadcom also promises “full compliance” with IEEE 802.11bn and the Wi-Fi Alliance’s Wi-Fi 8 specifications.
The company didn’t announce a radio specifically for PC, though the BCM43109 chip for handsets includes a two-stream Wi-Fi radio instead. It will also include Bluetooth capabilities as well as low-range WPAN, including ZigBee Pro. It, too, promises IEEE 802.11bn and Wi-Fi 8 compliance.
Author: Mark Hachman, Senior Editor, PCWorld
Mark has written for PCWorld for the last decade, with 30 years of experience covering technology. He has authored over 3,500 articles for PCWorld alone, covering PC microprocessors, peripherals, and Microsoft Windows, among other topics. Mark has written for publications including PC Magazine, Byte, eWEEK, Popular Science and Electronic Buyers' News, where he shared a Jesse H. Neal Award for breaking news. He recently handed over a collection of several dozen Thunderbolt docks and USB-C hubs because his office simply has no more room.