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In January 2025, Qualcomm, the US-headquartered chipmaker, hosted a roundtable to discuss the company’s latest technology initiatives and India operations. Reports emerging from this roundtable underlined a key aspect—conflict around the latest standards of wireless Internet connectivity, Wi-Fi 7.
During its presentation, Qualcomm said that it is moving ahead with equipping devices to support Wi-Fi 7, even in India—despite a lack of clarity around whether the 6GHz telecommunications connectivity spectrum would be available for usage in India. The reason for this is simple—despite over a year of debates, no party has decided whether the 6GHz spectrum bands would also be accessible to technology firms.
If previous-generation Wi-Fi networks could transfer 5GB of data in 50 ms, Wi-Fi 7 should be able to transfer 15GB of data with a network latency of under 5 ms.
As a result, even as India pushes for foundational research in fields such as 6G networks and quantum communications, the currently available wireless home Internet standard of Wi-Fi 7 remains unavailable mainly in the country. In fact, on 8 November last year, Japanese tech and media conglomerate Sony decided not to launch its PlayStation 5 Pro gaming console in India, citing conflicts with the console’s inability to work on Wi-Fi 7 in India.
Why the Issue?
To understand this further, it is essential to know why the 6GHz band is contentious. The latter, which covers a wireless communications spectrum ranging from 5925MHz to 7125MHz, is currently reserved partially by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) for use in satellite communications services.
Telecom operators have pitched for spectrum usage with the central government’s Department of Telecommunications, stating that the spectrum band is crucial for delivering low latency 5G connectivity to homes nationwide. As a result, the operators have urged DoT to open up access to this band for terrestrial network usage.
However, telecom operators have argued that they should be given exclusive access to all the bands within this spectrum frequency and not be given partial access or made to share the infrastructure with technology firms for other services. Telecom operators Bharti Airtel, Reliance Jio, and Vodafone Idea, to be sure, are essentially rivals to home fibre broadband-linked Wi-Fi services.
Until this conflict clears, there is widespread ambiguity regarding the usage of this sensitive spectrum band. Due to its unique frequency positioning, the 6GHz band is considered ideal for effective end-to-end communications operations—and is thus in demand from parties involved in terrestrial wireless networks, home wireless services, and space communications for satellites.
Wi-Fi 6e has already showcased a future that combines Wi-Fi connectivity using each of the 2.4GHz, 5GHz and 6GHz spectrum bands.
So, why are Wi-Fi 7 stakeholders fighting to gain access to this band? The answer lies in the inherent technology that it operates upon.
So far, Wi-Fi 6e has already showcased a future that combines Wi-Fi connectivity using each of the 2.4GHz, 5GHz and 6GHz spectrum bands. With Wi-Fi 7, this is expected to go one step higher by improving the usage of all the bands to deliver data packets. With three combined bands, Wi-Fi connectivity at home using the latest standards should theoretically be able to provide wireless Internet services with exponentially lower latencies while improving the data throughput, or the amount of data that can be passed from the network router to endpoint devices.
In simple terms, if previous generation Wi-Fi networks could transfer 5GB of data with a response time of 50 ms (milliseconds), Wi-Fi 7 should be able to transfer 15GB of data with a network latency of under 5ms. Therefore, the most significant advantage here is the ability to transfer higher-fidelity content wirelessly without communication lags. In turn, consumers can expect higher-resolution content live-streamed across a broader range of platforms, multi-party video conferencing without lags, competitive multiplayer gaming with simultaneous live-streaming at high resolution, and more.
While each of these use cases sounds worth the hype behind the technology, much depends on the availability of all the requisite spectrum bands.
Still on The Way
Despite this, networking hardware manufacturers have reinstated that they are well on bringing the latest Wi-Fi 7 standard to India. Apple’s latest iPhone 16 series already supports Wi-Fi 7, and an upcoming wave of flagship smartphones is expected to increase the number of consumer devices around us that support the standard. Even within laptops, the latest-generation MacBooks from Apple and neural processing unit (NPU)-powered AI PCs from the likes of HP, Dell, and others are set to support the latest Wi-Fi standard.
Telcos have pitched for spectrum usage with the DoT, stating that the spectrum band is crucial for delivering low-latency 5G connectivity.
However, there is a catch: In India, the version of Wi-Fi 7 currently set to roll out is truncated, which will support simultaneous multi-band connectivity on the presently used 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands. As a result, this limits the performance potential of Wi-Fi 7 in terms of its net bandwidth support and the lowest possible latency that it can support.
At the Qualcomm roundtable, company executives affirmed that Wi-Fi 7 “will still offer a significant upgrade compared to what Wi-Fi 6 and Wi-Fi 6e have offered—but with the 6GHz band, there would be clear scope for its full performance to be realised.”
However, regulatory compliance can create issues, such as modems not working properly when configured to work with the 6GHz spectrum. One such instance occurred with the Sony PlayStation 5 Pro when the Japanese veteran pulled the product from the market due to this conflict.
Explaining why this issue occurred, a veteran telecommunications industry executive who has previously worked with multiple OEMs said, “The key issue here is that if you want a Wi-Fi 7 modem to work without all of its bands in tandem, you would need to configure it specifically for that purpose.”
This means additional hardware tweaks, engineering and validation work at a software level, and then shipping a small batch of this truncated Wi-Fi 7 version to the selected market—in this case, India.
“This may not always make sense—for instance, in the case of the PS5 Pro, Sony would not have expected it to be sold at high volumes. In that case, doing all of this customisation to have a specialised version of Wi-Fi work would not make commercial sense due to the added cost of all this work,” the executive said anonymously since he was not authorised to comment on behalf of Sony.
In the long run, more such issues will start rising. Qualcomm expects custom Wi-Fi 7 solutions to emerge from India until clarity is received on the spectrum’s allocation outside of space. For the latter, this makes sense since Qualcomm’s Wi-Fi 7 modems would cater to smartphones, PCs, and innovative things—each of which sells at high volumes.
None of this, however, is ideal, and until regulatory clarity is received, India will not be able to fully enjoy Wi-Fi 7’s capabilities.
By Vernika Awal
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