Chinese hardware manufacturer H3C has launched the “world’s first Wi-Fi 7 router”, the Magic BE18000. Even though Wi-Fi 7 still has not been certified by the Wi-Fi Alliance, that doesn’t seem to bother H3C too much.
The H3C Magic BE18000 Tri-Band Wi-Fi 7 Router (opens in new tab) is a wireless router that adopts Wi-Fi 7 (802.11be) tech on a 6GHz band that can provide download speeds up to a ridiculous 18,443Mbps. That’s significantly faster than even the recently released Wi-Fi 6, which maxes out at 9.6Gbps. It also looks like Bastion’s head (opens in new tab) from Overwatch, which I consider a plus.
Wi-Fi 7 is expected to deliver a considerable speed advantage over Wi-Fi 6 (nearly double) since its new 6GHz bands support 320MHz ultra-large bandwidth, a benefit for home streaming and gaming.
Wi-Fi 7’s most significant selling point is its Multi-Link Operation (MLO), which gives you low latency and better reliability by allowing devices to use multiple channels simultaneously. That results, so says H3C, in better speeds no matter how devices are connected.
We expected Wi-Fi 7 to be certified by the Wi-Fi Alliance in the latter half of 2023. Wireless gear getting released ahead of pre-approved standards isn’t uncommon, though seeing a product this far ahead is a little surprising. This doesn’t mean that the Magic BE18000 wouldn’t meet those official standards; it just hasn’t yet.
To receive certification from the Wi-Fi Alliance technologies need to meet industry-agreed standards for “interoperability, security, and a range of application-specific protocols,” which involves a lot of testing and takes some time.
We already know that chip makers like Qualcomm has plans for Wi-Fi 7 (opens in new tab) with its own Wi-Fi 7 chip, which would also be ahead of the assumed Wi-Fi 7 certification.