Edgewater Wireless Systems has announced the development of the next generation of its Wi-Fi Spectrum Slicing technology, based on the latest Wi-Fi standard, WiFi7 (802.11BE). The technology is being developed for residential, enterprise, and prosumer applications. The key benefit of Spectrum Slicing is that it offers more physical channel capacity than single-channel, legacy Wi-Fi architectures, resulting in lower latency and reduced contention for new and existing devices.
Engineering samples of Edgewater’s WiFi7 silicon platform are scheduled for release by the end of Q2 CY2024, with commercial products expected in the same period of the following year.
Edgewater’s solution unveils MLX 488 platform, its Spectrum Slicing-enabled WiFi7 solution, designed to take the Multi-Link Operation (MLO) feature to the next level. MLO is the first feature designed to leverage multi-channel architecture and the Dual-Channel Wi-Fi standard. It enhances the performance of devices and applications using multiple physical channels/links between access points. Edgewater’s Spectrum Slicing offers increased link density, resulting in a future-proof platform for service delivery.
WiFi7 (802.11BE), or Extremely High Throughput, is the newest iteration of the Wi-Fi standard which supports 320 MHz wide channels and increased quadrature amplitude modulation (4,096) in the 6 GHz band. WiFi7 with MLO promises to be a significant advancement for Wi-Fi, and Edgewater has taken advantage of this feature to create its MLX 488 WiFi7 platform. The platform features dynamic channel width powered by artificial intelligence, which supports up to 28 concurrent links/channels and Multi-Flex MLO, the first high-performance MLO solution engineered to support multiple concurrent MLO connections.
In addition, the MLX 488 WiFi7 platform is equipped with a real-time, full-band spectral surveillance architecture that ensures that spectral surveillance is integrated without disrupting Wi-Fi traffic. The platform’s Intelligent Channel Association (ICA™) optimizes device and application layer performance.
Most importantly, Edgewater’s Spectrum Slicing enables a frequency band to be divided or sliced to enable more radios to operate in a given area, leading to more in-band links/channels than all legacy Wi-Fi architectures. The approach is similar to moving from a single-lane road to a multilane highway.
Andrew Skafel, President and CEO of Edgewater Wireless, said, “Bringing Spectrum Slicing capabilities to a WiFi7 platform finally offers service providers a way to deliver next-level performance to new devices and the billions of existing Wi-Fi devices on their networks today. We are tackling some of the biggest challenges facing Wi-Fi today, and Spectrum Slicing has been proven to deliver dramatic performance gains for all devices.”
As Wi-Fi moves toward embracing multi-channel/link architecture, Edgewater is making great strides with its MLX 488 platform, which is designed exclusively for service providers. Edgewater’s MLX 488 platform is engineered to deliver high performance with proven robustness and flexibility, making it a future-proof platform for service delivery.