Wi-Fi 7 is on the way, is there a market for Wi-Fi 6E in China?

On January 7, US time, the Wi-Fi Alliance launched the Wi-Fi 6E certification service, marking the start of large-scale promotion of products using Wi-Fi 6E technology. A domestic EMC testing agency said that it had started Wi-Fi 6E testing and certification services two or three months ago. Currently, the United States, South Korea, and Chile have clearly opened the 6GHz band with a bandwidth of 1.2GHz to Wi-Fi use. Europe is expected to open it before the end of June 2021. Whether China will open this band is still undecided.

The Wi-Fi Alliance stated in a press release on the start of the Wi-Fi 6E certification service that after the US Federal Communications Commission decided to open the 1200MHz 6GHz band for Wi-Fi use, the United Kingdom, the European Union, Chile, South Korea and the United Arab Emirates also made decisions to provide the 6GHz band for Wi-Fi. Countries and regions including Brazil, Canada, Mexico, Peru, Taiwan, Japan, Saudi Arabia, Myanmar and Jordan are also exploring the opening of the 6GHz band for Wi-Fi.

The Wi-Fi Alliance divides Wi-Fi wireless network technology into six generations. The sixth-generation Wi-Fi technology Wi-Fi 6 uses the 802.11.ax protocol. The standard began to be formulated in 2015, and the Wi-Fi Alliance officially launched the Wi-Fi 6 certification service in 2019.

The "E" in Wi-Fi 6E stands for "Extended", which can be regarded as Wi-Fi 6 running on a 6GHz carrier, that is, Wi-Fi 6 is expanded from the original 2.4GHz and 5GHz carrier bands to support the 6GHz carrier band. At present, the Wi-Fi 6E spectrum promoted by the Wi-Fi Alliance is planned to be between 5925-7125MHz, a total of 1200MHz, including 7 160MHz channels, 14 80MHz channels, 29 40MHz channels, 60 20MHz channels, a total of 110 channels, compared with 45 channels of 5Ghz and 4 channels of 2.4Ghz, the capacity is larger and the throughput is greatly improved.

Compared with Wi-Fi 6, the biggest advantage of Wi-Fi 6E is that it has a relatively clean and continuous spectrum. The 2.4GHz band is extremely crowded and has a lot of interference, which has led the Wi-Fi Alliance to launch Wi-Fi technology that supports 5GHz carriers. However, the 5GHz band is also relatively crowded, and the 5G spectrum allocated to Wi-Fi in most regions is not continuous. In the US market, Wi-Fi 6 can support 4 80MHz and 2 160MHz channels, while in China there are only 2 80MHz channels.

In office applications, when multiple devices are connected, each device occupies bandwidth, resulting in a decrease in communication performance, which has an adverse impact on the user experience of devices with high bandwidth requirements. However, 6GHz is a relatively idle frequency band, and this time WiFi 6E can provide 7 consecutive 160MHz frequency bands at a time, which is very suitable for high-performance applications. This means that systems that support WiFi 6E can allocate traditional 2.4GHz and 5GHz frequency bands to devices with low performance requirements, and allocate clean and complete 6GHz frequency bands to high-performance devices, so that different devices can get what they need.

In the plan approved by the U.S. Communications Commission (FCC), all 1.2GHz bandwidth between 5925-7125MHz is allocated to Wi-Fi use. Currently, the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) has only authorized channels from 5925-6425MHz to Wi-Fi 6E, and China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has not yet given an opinion on the spectrum division of Wi-Fi 6E.

However, in recent years, China has been promoting the allocation of 6GHz spectrum to mobile communications. At the 2019 World Radiocommunication Conference (WRC-19), the Chinese delegation vigorously promoted the establishment of the 5925-7125 MHz IMT (International Mobile Telecommunications System) labeling project as a new topic for the 2023 World Radiocommunication Conference (WRC-23). ​​In the end, the WCR-19 conference decided to include the new IMT (5G or 6G) use labeling for the 6GHz (6425-7125MHz) frequency band in the WRC-23 1.2 agenda, and to conduct project research on 6425-7025MHz becoming a new regional (Arab countries, Africa, Europe, CIS countries) IMT band and 7025-7125MHz becoming a new global IMT band.

The EU has currently only approved the first 500MHz of the 6GHz band to be allocated to Wi-Fi, and reserved the 6425-7125MHz band for mobile communications. Assuming that the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology divides the 6GHz band according to the EU standards, Wi-Fi 6E products may still be available in China. If the entire 5925-7125 band is allocated to mobile communications, Wi-Fi 6E products will not be available in China.

From the chip level, European and American companies such as Broadcom, Qualcomm, Intel, and Quantenna have already launched SoC chips that support Wi-Fi 6E in 2020. NXP also launched its first Wi-Fi 6E chip in January. MediaTek in Asia and Celeno in Israel are also able to provide mass-produced Wi-Fi 6E chips.

IDC research director Phil Solis is optimistic about the Wi-Fi 6E market. He said that in 2021, 338 million devices worldwide will support Wi-Fi 6E. By 2022, Wi-Fi 6E shipments will account for 20% of the total shipments of devices supporting 802.11.ax.

This is a big piece of cake. However, a senior industry insider said that currently no company in mainland China has launched a research and development plan for Wi-Fi 6E chips, and the undetermined spectrum allocation should be an important reason.

However, there are quite a lot of domestic chip companies that are engaged in Wi-Fi 6. Huawei HiSilicon, Unisoc, Zheku Technology (Oppo subsidiary), Aojie Technology, Amlogic Semiconductor, Espressif Technology, Aike Microelectronics, etc. are all developing Wi-Fi 6 chips.

From the perspective of chip development, it is not difficult to upgrade Wi-Fi 6 to Wi-Fi 6E. The protocol part is exactly the same. Mainly the RF part needs to be modified to support the 6GHz spectrum and to make software adaptation in the application. If the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology reserves part of the spectrum for Wi-Fi 6E in the future, there will still be opportunities in the domestic market.

Of course, don’t worry even if you can’t use Wi-Fi 6E, after all, Wi-Fi 7 is on the way.