On Wednesday, Qualcomm (NASDAQ:QCOM) Technologies announced its new '10G Fiber Gateway Platform' and a cloud-based 'Service Defined' Wi-Fi solution, which aim to revolutionize home and business connectivity. The platform is scheduled to be commercially available by summer 2024.
The company's new offerings are designed to enhance the performance of wireless networks for service providers and enterprise customers. Qualcomm's 'Service Defined' Wi-Fi platform is set to provide a unified data flow management architecture, which can adapt to user activities such as gaming, streaming, or video conferencing. This technology is expected to optimize the utilization of newly deployed fiber optic cable and new technology like Wi-Fi 7.
The platform will also give service providers tools to improve network performance. Current systems manage network access to the home and Wi-Fi within the home separately, reducing the quality of service across the network. However, with Service Defined, Qualcomm aims to offer service providers unprecedented orchestration and insights that can enhance subscriber experience. It will enable them to offer differentiated services optimized for various uses.
In addition to its Service Defined technology, Qualcomm's 10G Fiber Gateway will facilitate 10Gbps connectivity "to and through the home" using 10G Passive Optical Network (LON:NETW) (PON) tech and multi-gigabit Wi-Fi 7.
According to Ganesh Swaminathan, VP and GM of Qualcomm's wireless infrastructure and networking business, the new platform will enable service providers to extend service level agreements to the Wi-Fi network and program the gateway to deliver service precisely. This could effectively improve Wi-Fi connection performance in areas such as latency as network conditions change.
Qualcomm's new software-based Wi-Fi management platform can run on a range of access networks, including fiber-to-the-premises (FTTP), hybrid fiber/coax (HFC)/DOCSIS and fixed wireless access (FWA). Its latest move into the broadband gateway arena is fiber-focused.
In addition to these developments, Qualcomm announced a pair of service provider wins. Charter Communications (NASDAQ:CHTR) will use Qualcomm technology to deploy Wi-Fi 7 capabilities on new routers available to Charter customers in 2024. Furthermore, EE, a BT Group (LON:BT) brand/unit, has partnered with Qualcomm for future Wi-Fi 7 rollouts on the UK-based operator's new home broadband "Smart Hub," set to debut next year.
Qualcomm's move into this market segment will place the company in closer competition with firms such as Airties, DZS, Calix (NYSE:CALX) and Plume. Despite this, Qualcomm plans to use open APIs (application programming interfaces) to build a framework that can integrate with other cloud platforms already in use by service operators.
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