Qualcomm’s Wi-Fi 7 mesh tech means 20Gbps for your home

Qualcomm has announced a new Wi-Fi 7 home network platform, which will power supercharged mesh systems.

The Qualcomm Wi-Fi 7 Immersive Home Platform is the catchy name given to the system, which aims to smartly improve the speed and performance of your home network and smart home devices, via the power of the latest Wi-Fi standard.

Many people are only just getting on board with Wi-Fi 6 (it only launched in 2020) – but that hasn’t stopped IEEE 802.11BE – which is the cool name for Wi-Fi 7 – from rolling out.

Qualcomm boasts that its Wi-Fi 7 Immersive Home Platform mesh systems will enable 20Gbps capacity around the home network.

• Best smart home systems

Central to this is the company’s Multi-Link technology, which opens up all channels to home network traffic, including the 320MHz backhaul channel. This includes the data superhighway that’s previously been reserved for data between the mesh nodes.

The Immersive Home Platform will smartly manage these channels, and open them up to network traffic in the home, if and when it’s required. And it will also enable devices to hop between the 5GHz and 6GHz spectrums.

And Qualcomm states that the benefits of Multi-Link will mean a 3x improvement in the capacity of your home network, and improve the performance of devices in the extremities of your home.

This could mean smart home devices, such as Wi-Fi 7-enabled cameras, for example.

But there are some caveats. First, you’ll need a Wi-Fi 7 mesh system with this Qualcomm chip inside. And Qualcomm says that’s rolling out to Mesh systems from Linksys, Netgear, and TP-Link early in 2023, so that’s good news.

But devices connected to the network will also need to be Wi-Fi 7 enabled, in order for the Multi-link tech to do its work.

Any older devices, including Wi-Fi 6 ones, will be part of the legacy channel – which is still likely to be crowded for the foreseeable.

Obviously, as your home fills up with Wi-Fi 7-enabled devices, that will allow more room for the legacy ones – but this isn’t going to be an overnight revolution for the smart home.

We’ll keep you in the loop with when Wi-Fi 7 mesh systems start coming available next year.