Wireless networking has seen rapid strides over the last couple of years with the opening up of the 6 GHz spectrum for Wi-Fi purposes. Silicon vendors updated their Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax) solutions with support for the new band and router / access point vendors followed suit. Last year saw the introduction of Wi-Fi 7 silicon based on 802.11be from all the major silicon vendors - Broadcom, Qualcomm, and Mediatek. Intel also provided hints about their upcoming Wi-Fi 7 client platform in their interoperability demo with Broadcom's AP design. Following this, companies such as TP-Link and ASUS (RT-BE96U and ROG Rapture GT-BE98) started to divulge details of their first-generation Wi-Fi 7 products. TP-Link's offerings have been up for pre-order since January, with shipment originally slated for Q1 2023. Today, Netgear is announcing their first Wi-Fi 7 product - the Nighthawk RS700 wireless router.
As a refresher, Wi-Fi 7 brings a host of improvements to the wireless experience with faster speeds (true multi-gigabit, making it necessary to equip the routers with wired 10G ports), lower latency, and better efficiency in channel utilization (particularly with multiple clients in the picture). The standard also allows multi-link operation with the clients being able to connect to the AP over different bands simultaneously. All Wi-Fi 7 routers have to be tri-band (2.4 GHz, 5 GHz, and 6 GHz support) to bring out all the benefits of the new standard. Compared to their Wi-Fi 6E flagship Nighthawk, the RS700 boasts of almost double the wireless throughput, and comes with 10G WAN and LAN ports. It is based on Broadcom's Wi-Fi 7 platform (BCM4916 network SoC + BCM67263 / BCM6726 radios).
