Deep Dive Teardown of the H3C Magic BE18000 WiFi Router
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The H3C Magic BE18000 is one of the first Wi-Fi 7 (802.11be) routers on the market. It is powered by Qualcomm’s chipset and a 2.2 GHz quad-core processor + 1 GB of RAM and 128 MB of storage. It uses MU-MIMO in 2.4 and 5GHz WiFi bands and there are 16 antennas inside (4x2.4GHz MIMO omnidirectional antennas + 3 sets of 5GHz MIMO directional antennas). This device can cover up to 200m². The router comes with one 10 Gbps and three 10/100/1000 Mbps Multi-Gigabit Ethernet LAN ports. Thanks to the tri-band the device can go up to 18443Mbps of speed (1148 + 5765 + 11530Mbps). Four antennas are made on PCB. The next twelve antennas were divided into three sets of four antennas directed in three directions, creating a triangle. All of them are connected to the Main Board with coaxial cable. Each of the sixteen antennas has its front-end module (for 4x2.4GHz it is Skyworks SKY85333-11 and for 12x5GHz it is Kxcomtech KCT8570HE). The front ends then connect to Qualcomm Transceivers (for 2.4GHz QCN5024 and for 5GHz QCN6224-001) managed by the Qualcomm SoC IPQ9574-11.
