Anyone who has hoped that Apple will use its brand new combined Bluetooth, thread and WLAN radio chip N1 to explore what is possible with Wi-Fi 7, unfortunately it is disappointed: As can be seen from documents to the American radio network regulatory authority Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Macrumors discovered Has, there are no changes to Broadcom’s chips built into older models. Specifically, it is about the maximum possible channel width of 320 MHz in the 6 GHz band, which Wi-Fi 7 actually allows.
Various prerequisites are necessary
As with Broadcom chips, Apple limits them to 160 MHz (alternatively 20, 40 or 80 MHz), so there is no shovel on it. This means that the iPhone-17 series does not reach the theoretical Wi-Fi-7 maximum speed. The term “theoretical” must also be taken literally here: a whole range of requirements should already be met (such as a suitable router and no interpretation) in order to achieve this.
In addition, internet providers do not offer the bandwidth anyway, so it is only about transmissions in the home network. With Wi-Fi 7, four Mimo streams and a channel width of 320 MHz, 11,530 Mbit/s would be possible; At 160 MHz it is 5760 Mbit/s. However, Wi-Fi-7 contrasts are slowly spreading and not all support 320 MHz. Only when both the base station and client can do this does Wi-Fi offer 7 full speed.
N1 closer linked to the iPhone
According to Apple, the N1 has some advantages as a combination chip. Because only Apple knows his hardware so well, it is adapted exactly to the iPhone 17 and is intended to offer faster performance among system services such as airdrop and personal hotspot – how much faster, but is also still unclear.
In addition, there are energy saving options that only masters Apple because the N1 should be anchored in the system than the components of the suppliers. The internal firmware can also update Apple faster (e.g. with an iOS update) without having to wait for Broadcom. The iPhone-17 models will be on sale from Friday.
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