802.11ax Wi-Fi Ecosystem Taking Shape but Challenges Ahead

The race to IEEE 802.11ax Wi-Fi is on. Qualcomm’s recently unveiled WCN3998 solution is the latest addition to a growing number of pre-standard or 802.11ax “ready” chipsets hitting the market, following on from previous announcements by Qualcomm, Broadcom, Marvell, Quantenna, Intel and Celeno, that have predominantly targeted the access point space. Some of these access point chipsets are already being supported in commercial networking products, with the likes of ASUS, D-Link, H3C and Huawei having already introduced early 802.11ax ready access point and gateways to the market. 

Qualcomm’s new WCN3998 solution is the most recent to target the smartphone arena, following in the footsteps of Broadcom’s BCM4375 chipset announced in August 2017. While the standard is not expected to be completed until late 2019, Wi-Fi chipset vendors are keen to bring some of the major 802.11ax features to OEMs ahead of the ratification, ensuring a smooth and swift rollout of the technology, and enabling them to take advantage of much needed performance enhancements and efficiency improvements ahead of the traditional curve. 

In contrast to previous Wi-Fi standards that emphasise peak throughput, 802.11ax is designed around expanding capacity, extending coverage, and enhancing the overall user experience, particularly in crowded environments. Enormous growth in Wi-Fi-enabled devices, increased traffic demands, cellular offloading, higher density Wi-Fi deployments, growing use of outdoor Wi-Fi, heterogenous device and traffic types, and a desire for more power efficiency are all major driving forces behind 802.11ax’s introduction. To achieve this, 802.11ax is introducing a substantial number of new enhancements to both the 5GHz and recently neglected 2.4GHz bands, the most important of which include support for 8x8 antenna configurations, Downlink and Uplink MU-MIMO, OFDMA, spatial reuse techniques, Target Wake Time (TWT), 1024 QAM modulation, and many others. As a result, the 802.11ax standard is relatively complex and a significant upgrade to previous versions. 

However, with greater complexity comes greater challenges. 802.11ax Draft 1.0 in November 2016 and Draft 2.0 in September 2017 both failed to reach approval within the IEEE working group. Draft 2.0 received 62% approval and collected nearly 3400 comments to be addressed. As a result, the initial sponsor ballet has been pushed back from November 2018 until May 2019, with final approval of the standard now likely to occur in December 2019, almost 6 months behind the initially scheduled July 2019. Any further delays to the standard process could further push back wide scale adoption of the technology by a further 6-12 months. Consequently, chipset suppliers are doing everything they can to get some of the key enhancements of 802.11ax into the hands of OEMs as quickly as possible to help speed up the process and bring about a smooth and swift transition to the 802.11ax standard when it does arrive.

Several pre-standard 802.11ax access point chipsets have already been announced, each with different capabilities. The higher end of Quantenna and Qualcomm’s solutions are claiming to support 12 streams, 8x8 in the 5GHz and 4x4 in the 2.4GHz. Marvell’s premium AP solution supports 8x8, while Broadcom’s and Intel’s current portfolio both max. out at 4x4 solutions. Qualcomm’s AP solution has already gained some traction on the market. In September 2017, Huawei launched their X-Gen Wi-Fi enterprise access point targeting campus applications utilizing Qualcomm’s chipset. Further announcements from KDDI and Korea Telecom for home and commercial environments highlight Qualcomm’s potential growth in this space. Broadcom’s Max Wi-Fi AP solutions are also very well supported, with numerous key 802.11ax access point partnerships announced to date including Altice, ARRIS, ASUS, D-Link, NETGEAR, Sagecom, Technicolor, and TP-Link. Broadcom’s strong presence in the access point market therefore looks set to continue as vendors transition to 802.11ax. Marvell has not yet announced partners but has been sampling to lead customers from early 2017 and is expecting to gain significant traction over the next 12 months. Quantenna is strongly targeting the multi-AP mesh networking market with its solutions and is expecting to sample its QSR10R-AX chipset to early access partners in the first half of 2018.

In contrast to the AP market, the client level support for 802.11ax is currently only being supported by Broadcom’s BCM4375 and Qualcomm’s QCA6290 / WCN3998 2x2 solutions. Qualcomm’s most recent approach with the WCN3998 is to promote what they feel are some of the key future features of 802.11ax, including 8x8 sounding and target wake time, and combining them with other enhancements to Bluetooth and support for WPA3 encryption that smartphone OEMs can take advantage of immediately. Qualcomm’s intention in introducing these chipsets is not to show that 802.11ax is ready in its current form, but to offer OEMs an early start on some of 802.11ax’s key features while addressing more immediate needs of the market such as improvements in audio quality and the desire for better security features. Qualcomm claims that there is a lot of interest among OEMs who want to address the major business needs of improving performance and capacity without waiting for the full features of 802.11ax, and they are hoping that their combination of pre-standard features, Bluetooth enhancements, 8x8 sounding, and WPA3 support will be able to offer a compelling enough reason for OEMs to adopt their 802.11ax ready solution versus the competition. Broadcom’s BCM4375 Max Wi-Fi solution is a Bluetooth 5.0+ and Wi-Fi combo solution also targeting the smartphone market. In addition to TWT, MU-MIMO, and 4x4 sounding, Broadcom’s solutions emphasise other key features of the upcoming 802.11ax standard including OFDMA and spatial reuse techniques. Broadcom has a leading presence in flagship devices from the likes of Apple, Samsung and Huawei, and their combo chipsets are often the connectivity solution of choice for those vendors developing their own application processors. Qualcomm has an enormous presence in the application processor space, and their integrated connectivity is utilized by a number of leading vendors including Xiaomi, OPPO, Samsung, Huawei, Vivo, and LeEco, among others. Qualcomm’s WCN3998 solution will be integrated in upcoming Snapdragon platforms. Both vendors will be hoping their continued innovations in this space will help incentivize OEMs to upgrade to 802.11ax solutions in the near future.

However, the question remaining for OEMs is whether or not they should wait until the standard is more stable before adopting an 802.11ax ready solution. A wait-and-see approach could arguably result in a longer lead time, and some OEMs may lose out to those who are proactive in getting their designs ready for the full version of the standard. Some in the industry believe that due to the additional complexity of the 802.11ax standard, it is important to 802.11ax chipsets in the hands of engineers sooner rather than later to help them build devices around the new features. If an OEM does decide to hold back, their first devices integrating an 802.11ax chipset may come 6-18 months behind that of the competition. 

However, device OEMs have traditionally been hesitant to adopt solutions before standardization. At this time, chipset vendors cannot guarantee that their 802.11ax chipsets will be compatible with the final standard. There is a risk that chipsets arriving on the market too early may not be compatible with the full standard, and as interoperability is not guaranteed, a solution from one chipset vendor may not be fully compatible or offer limited performance gains with a solution from another. Moreover, it is not always guaranteed that early deployments can simply be upgraded to the final version of 802.11ax when it arrives in late 2019. Also, while these 802.11ax ready chipsets can undoubtedly bring about improvements in performance, they may not yet be compelling enough for OEMs to justify upgrading, and some may wait for the more comprehensive features of 802.11ax to be introduced to be able to demonstrate more significant upgrades on their existing solutions.

Ultimately, some OEMs may wait until Draft 3.0 is completed and approved before adopting the technology. Others may want to take advantage of these immediate benefits, and Broadcom and Qualcomm in the smartphone space, among numerous others on the AP side, are well placed to provide solutions to those who do. There is already a growing competitive landscape among Wi-Fi chipset vendors for 802.11ax solutions, and combined, these are likely to help narrow the time between standard ratification and deployment to the market.

In conclusion, tier one OEMs should consider using 802.11ax ready features to test the water in some advanced devices to demonstrate the new capabilities of the standard and investigate potential opportunities that 802.11ax may unlock for them. However, these players may be reluctant to take the risk of integrating these features into their flagship devices.  For the challengers among tier two OEMs, implementing 802.11ax ready chipsets could give them the opportunity to differentiate and win market share.