Wifi 7 clarification

I reviewed the Bluetooth Launch Studio Listing Search again and found some new Broadcom cards.

The Broadcom BCM4390 in particular is promising. It supports Wi-Fi 7 + BT 5.4 LE Audio + LC3 + IAL. But the product page says it’s for mobile and tablet so there may never be an M.2 laptop version. It also only supports dual-band Wi-Fi 7 with 160MHz channel width, but that’s probably plenty of speed for me anyway.

The Broadcom BCM4383 also supports BT 5.4 LE Audio + LC3 + IAL, but is only Wi-Fi 6E. And finally the Broadcom BCM4398 supports faster quad-band Wi-Fi 7 with 320MHz channel width, but only BT 5.2 per their product page. That’s maybe OK since LE Audio debuted with 5.2. And their Bluetooth Launch Studio page actually says BT 5.4 with support for IAL – but no LC3 support. :man_shrugging:

The MSI Herald-BE NCM865 currently seems to be the only standalone product currently commercially available with the Qualcomm chipset FastConnect 7800 / NCM865 / QCNCM865 / WCN7850. It is working for Framework Linux users per thread [GUIDE] Successful Wi-Fi 7 (802.11be) on Framework 13 AMD with Qualcomm QCNCM865 and Arch Linux. It has dual-band 2x2 Wi-Fi 7 with 320 MHz channel width and BT 5.4, but it does not support LC3. The Bluetooth Launch Studio Listing Detail for Qualcomm D060636 does appear when you search and filter by IAL and Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., but does not appear when you add the LC3 filter. Qualcomm already owns and licenses aptX, so I guess that’s a business move to try and keep LC3 from gaining adoption. But I wish they would stop that behavior and support both LC3 + aptX.