On January 9, 2019, MediaTek announced today the launch of its latest smart connectivity chipset for home and enterprise network services, supporting Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax), the next-generation Wi-Fi technology. The chipset will support a range of products including wireless access points, routers, gateways and repeaters to bring faster, more reliable connectivity to the entire smart home.

MediaTek's Wi-Fi 6 chip supports 2x2 and 4x4 configurations and is compliant with the latest technology standards. The Wi-Fi 6 chip also has a flexible architecture that will support updated features when the Wi-Fi 6 specification is finalized by the end of 2019.

“Many popular smart consumer devices rely on MediaTek's portfolio of high-performance connectivity products. Today, with support for next-generation Wi-Fi 6 technology, we will create a more stable and seamless connectivity experience for consumers.” MediaTek Senior Yu Renjie, deputy general manager and general manager of the intelligent equipment business group, said, “We will continue to bring the most advanced technologies and standards to the consumer and enterprise markets through innovative R&D.” MediaTek is currently in TV, streaming media equipment, smart speakers. The market for intelligent voice assistants and tablets is the market leader.

Based on the 802.11ax technical specification, MediaTek's Wi-Fi 6 chipset brings the following advantages to device manufacturers:

Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA): Uplink and downlink OFDMA improves the efficiency and capacity of wireless network devices; ensuring bandwidth for applications such as voice, video, social networking, and gaming through download and uplink scheduling.

Multi-User MIMO (MU-MIMO): Increases channel capacity when serving multiple devices operating simultaneously.

Target Wake-up Time (TWT): Defines the specific time when the client wakes up and sleeps to reduce IoT device power consumption and extend battery life.

Spatial multiplexing: Allows the access point to intelligently decide on the point in time at which data is transmitted to share channel capacity.

MediaTek also brings a unique built-in solution to its chipset while meeting the latest Wi-Fi standards to improve the end-user experience. The MediaTek connection technology supporting OFDMA and 1024QAM solves the problem of data traffic conflicts; and achieves higher Internet data rates by rescheduling multi-user data packets, thus eliminating the delay in running online games or watching streaming video.

The latest Wi-Fi 6 access point + Bluetooth Combo chip provides better concurrency between Wi-Fi and Bluetooth to ensure spectral efficiency when two sets of wireless communication work simultaneously.

MediaTek also supports and leads the deployment of the Wi-Fi Alliance EasyMesh standard, which is tailored to the expansion of Wi-Fi coverage. MediaTek's smart home chipset will be compatible with the EasyMesh standard. This new standard extends the range of Wi-Fi signals so that users can have full access both indoors and outdoors.