Supply Chain Headwinds Could Speed Transition to Wi-Fi 7, Parks Event Told

Supply chain disruption will likely speed the transition to new Wi-Fi technologies, panelists said on Parks Associates’ Thursday virtual Connections event. Legacy chips are based on older wafer technology that’s “impossible to use” during the current wafer crisis,” said Oz Yildirim, Airties general manager, so the transition to Wi-Fi 6, 6e and 7 “will just go faster.” At RF semiconductor company Qorvo, Wi-Fi 6 and 6e technology are well over 80% of shipments, said Marketing Director Tony Testa.

“The chipset crisis has hit us,” said John Minasyan, director-product management at Linksys parent Belkin. “It has blown up just about every road map plan that I think anyone in the industry has had, and will continue to do so,” he said.

Taking the internet service provider (ISP) perspective, Minasyan said mesh systems have multiple nodes running concurrently in the home, with each “a potential failure point.” When one fails, the ISP is expected to ship a new one to the customer, he said. “Inevitably, we’re going to run into a situation where you have a mismatch” of older generation Wi-Fi 5, 6, 6e, and soon, Wi-Fi 7-type devices, he said, “and all of these things have to run in concert” in the home. That “exponentially increases the complexities that you need to worry about and manage.”

A challenge for networking device makers is consumers’ desire for smaller, discreet and “more aesthetic” routers, which goes “the opposite direction” of the needs of the hardware to deliver more multiple-input multiple-output configurations and more power. That’s accelerating Wi-Fi standards development, Testa said, “to keep power and thermals minimized and allow these devices to be small and not noisy,” he said.

Even before the pandemic, internet connectivity was “as essential as water,” said Yildirim. Work, school, entertainment and healthcare from home trends since the start of the pandemic strained the home Wi-Fi network further. Many consumers are still using legacy 802.11n and g routers based on Wi-Fi standards from over a decade ago, said Parks analyst Jennifer Kent.

The average U.S. broadband household has 14.6 connected devices, Kent said, with many more low-bandwidth products being added in different areas of the home. Growth is coming from smart thermostats and lighting, plus connected healthcare products including smartwatches, Wi-Fi weight scales and connected fitness equipment.

Most demand on the network still comes from higher bandwidth activity such as mobile, computing, connected TV, music and gaming. More than half of U.S. internet households own a smart TV, “and a lot of them are streaming in 4K video,” said Kent, and videoconferencing added to the streaming video load. All told, consumers are “running up against the limitations of their Wi-Fi coverage,” she said.

Performance issues are on the rise with the additional networking load, Kent said. More than half of Wi-Fi owners reported issues in the last 12 months, led by complaints over speed, loss of connection and coverage gaps, she said. A top issue survey respondents report with smart home devices is “falling off the network,” she said.

Noting the complexity of networking various devices, software and connectivity solutions, Support.com Vice President Business Development Todd Kozee said customers have grown to expect seamless interconnectivity, "and there’s so many reasons why it might not happen." Kent said the path to resolution of issues “isn’t always clear” to consumers, whether problems are with the ISP, the gateway or a device connected to the gateway. “Everyone in the ecosystem is having to bear the support costs of things not working correctly,” she said.

The Matter protocol should help solve compatibility issues in home networking and beyond, panelists said. Testa noted that consumers often buy an IoT device that’s associated with a specific radio protocol or unique software capabilities, not understanding which other products it will work with. “As Matter rolls out into the systems, we’ll have this overlaying communication that allows the data and the links to communicate across these different radio protocols,” he said. The communication will be invisible to the consumer: “You won’t have to have a host of different gateways and different connectivity devices to manage these new IoT devices,” he said.

When so many IoT devices jump on a Wi-Fi network, “you are straining and stressing that network,” said Belkin’s Minasyan. Consumers shouldn’t have to know what Quality of Service is in order to get the network performance needed for streaming TV at the expense of connected thermostats, he said. “We want the system to be intelligent enough to be able to do that automatically for them.” Matter “standardizes things” so that from a consumer perspective, “it becomes a lot more palatable and usable.”

Chipset vendors are working to get Wi-Fi 7 to market, Minasyan said. He cited 5G as a potential delivery option for home networking, noting it costs about $55,000 a mile “to trench for new fiber,” plus $55 per subscriber to set up a new 5G connection. “The economics are certainly compelling for 5G as a delivery option,” he said, but its “Achilles’ heel” is that it works well outdoors but "doesn’t do so well indoors. You really need that offload capability going from 5G to Wi-Fi” inside a premises, he said. Minasyan sees an opportunity for dual delivery of broadband service.