News Qualcomm Unveils New Modular Wi-Fi 6E Device Family

[Julio Urquidi]

The Qualcomm Immersive Home Platforms (IHP) consist of four new devices designed to deliver Wi-Fi 6 and 6E Gigabit speeds in the home. Modular and compact in design, the new Immersive Home Platforms combine newer networking packet processing tech, Wi-Fi 6 and 6E, and physical design flexibility for networking product manufacturers and service providers.

The Immersive Home Platform is essentially the consumer version of the enterprise-grade Networking Pro 6E family introduced back in May. Unlike the more expensive Networking Pro family, the IHP devices include dual-band offerings. They also are more highly integrated, enabling two-chip mesh node designs, even for tri-band products.

The four products include two tri-band platforms (310 Series) and two dual-band platforms (210 Series):

• Qualcomm Immersive Home 318 Platform
  • Advanced 8-stream Tri-Band in a 2x2 (2.4GHz) + 2x2 (5GHz) + 4x4 (6GHz) configuration, for a total of 7.8 Gbps total available PHY rate.
  • 4x4 Wi-Fi 6E configuration in the 6GHz band delivers enhanced performance, range, and/or client count
• Qualcomm Immersive Home 316 Platform
  • Advanced 6-stream Tri-Band in a 2x2 (2.4GHz) + 2x2 (5GHz) + 2x2 (6GHz) configuration, for a total of 5.4 Gbps total available PHY rate.
• Qualcomm Immersive Home 216 Platform
  • Innovative 6-stream Wi-Fi 6 in a 2x2 (2.4GHz) + 4x4 (5GHz) configuration, for a total of 5.4 Gbps total available PHY rate.
  • 4x4 Wi-Fi 6 configuration in the 5GHz band delivers enhanced performance, range, and/or client count
• Qualcomm Immersive Home 214 Platform
  • Innovative 4-stream Wi-Fi 6 in a 2x2 (2.4GHz) + 2x2 (5GHz) configuration, for a total of 3.0 Gbps total available PHY rate.

Other common features include:

• Multi-gigabit wireless throughput for high performance clients.
• Support for 160 MHz channels in 5/6GHz bands (310 Series) and 5 GHz (210 Series).
• Support for many of the industry’s leading mesh software protocols, including Qualcomm Wi-Fi SON, the OpenSync open-source software, eero’s TrueMesh and the Wi-Fi Alliance’s Wi-Fi CERTIFIED EasyMesh standard.
• Qualcomm Immersive Home Platforms deliver 2.5 times throughput per watt when compared to the previous Qualcomm IPQ4xxx Wi-Fi 5 family.
• Feature advanced Qualcomm Multi-User Traffic Management technologies to balance and support all the Wi-Fi connected devices in a modern smart home.
• 310 series platforms provide latency reduction up to 8x in congested environments and wireless VR-class latency of <3ms for latency-sensitive applications.

A Qualcomm product manager said the new devices will support DFS in 5 GHz and are capable of employing OFDMA in backhaul connections. However, it will be up to end-product manufacturers to choose whether to enable those features.

While it will be possible for networking product makers to support 6 GHz operation in both front and backhaul connections, 6 GHz bandwidth will always be shared between the two. Even in "tri-band" designs, there is only one 6 GHz radio.

Home networking companies quoted in the announcement seem to look forward to the new platforms, including Belkin (Linksys), eero, NETGEAR, Plume, TP-Link, EnGenius, and others.

The Qualcomm Immersive Home Platforms are currently sampling with Qualcomm’s customers. Visit qualcomm.com/mesh-networking for more information.