QAM, or quadrature amplitude modulation, is a data transmission technology that sends digital data to a receiving device in the form of an analog signal. It is commonly used in modern wireless devices such as wireless routers. Since WiFi 5, 256QAM technology has become the standard and can meet most home network needs. However, WiFi 6 introduces 1024QAM, which can slightly increase bandwidth utilization efficiency by increasing the modulation rate, especially for gigabit bandwidth users.
4K QAM is a higher-level technology, which belongs to the next generation WiFi standard IEEE 802.11be, also known as WiFi7. The core of 4K QAM is to increase the modulation rate to 4096 QAM, which allows each OFDM subcarrier to carry 12-bit data, thus Achieving a significant increase in data rate, its peak PHY data rate is increased by 20% compared to 1024 QAM. Currently, some WIFI6 routers on the market claim to support 4K QAM, but please note that 4K QAM is not the official standard of the 802.11AX protocol. Currently, only Qualcomm provides 4096-QAM technology, and it is limited to communication between its own devices. Other devices may not be able to enjoy the speed improvements brought by this technology because they do not support 4K-QAM.
Qualcomm's 4K-QAM is mainly applicable to 5G/6G bands, and the 2.4G band still uses 1024-QAM, which means that when using the 2.4G band, the speed improvement is not obvious. Under the 160MHz bandwidth, 4K-QAM only supports 2*2 MIMO configuration. If a 4*4 160MHz configuration is required, it is still 1024-QAM, which means that theoretically under a 2*2 MIMO receiving device, 4K-QAM can provide a rate of 2882Mbps, which is 20% higher than the 2402Mbps of 1024-QAM.
