Today, at IFA Berlin, the world’s most prominent consumer electronics trade show, Qualcomm Incorporated President & CEO Cristiano Amon made history with the first public demonstration of the must-have Wi-Fi 7 feature: HBS (High Band Simultaneous) Multi-Link in 320MHz. 

While Wi-Fi 7 brings unprecedented improvements to Wi-Fi, HBS Multi-Link is the essential Wi-Fi 7 feature for smartphones, PCs, and next-gen XR devices. This is because it unlocks the full, global performance potential of Wi-Fi 7 for those devices, even when 6GHz spectrum is not yet available.

What is HBS Multi-Link?

HBS Multi-Link is an essential Wi-Fi 7 implementation that simultaneously leverages two Wi-Fi radios for four streams of high band connectivity in 5GHz and/or 6GHz bands. Qualcomm FastConnect 7800 Mobile Connectivity System supports all multi-link modes and, with HBS Multi-Link, users can realize minimized latency and interference, jitter-free connections, and blazing fast speeds. 

What does this mean for Wi-Fi 7? 

HBS Multi-Link is the only way to experience the full potential of Wi-Fi 7 globally. Where 6GHz spectrum has been made available for Wi-Fi, 320MHz channels enable peak real-world performance. However, as we showed today at IFA in a live, over-the-air demonstration, when 160MHz channels are available, HBS Multi-Link can deliver 5 Gbps of over-the-air throughput by aggregating those two 160MHz channels - over twice the performance of Wi-Fi 6/6E. This will be mission critical when 320MHz channels are unavailable due to congestion or any other reason. 

Without HBS Multi-Link, Wi-Fi 7 begins to look a lot like Wi-Fi 6. 

In regions where wider 320MHz channels are inaccessible because 6GHz spectrum itself is not yet available, HBS Multi-Link enables the aggregation of 160 + 80MHz channels to surge speeds up to 50 percent faster than Wi-Fi 6/6E.  

This is the kind of performance that will be at the heart of the most advanced use cases in XR, Metaverse, cloud-based gaming, 8K video streaming, video conferencing, and more. We are excited to have shared our progress on HBS Multi-Link – this essential Wi-Fi 7 feature – but even more so to deliver it to users around the world via FastConnect 7800 soon.

Qualcomm FastConnect is a product of Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. and/or its subsidiaries.