Nokia just hosted the first Apex Legends event completely over Wi-Fi

digitaltrends.com:

Nokia hosted a charity Apex Legends event last weekend that looked standard enough on the surface, but could be the first step in changing the internet provider landscape for gamers.

Thehide-and-seek tournament tasked teams of streamers and content creators with hiding from a professional team of seekers set on destroying them. If that weren’t enough of a deviation from the standard Apex Legends tournament, the organizers had one more big twist for participants: Everyone had to play over Wi-Fi instead of an Ethernet-based connection.

Cue the cries of outrage from every single streamer in the chat.

• Apex Legends and Rainbow Six Siege are coming to PlayStation Open Series
• League of Legends 2020 World Championship to push through in China amid COVID-19

The first-of-its-kind event centered around a new piece of tech from Nokia: the Wi-Fi Beacon 10. While not commercially available (and it won’t be anytime soon), this new internet gateway is Nokia’s attempt to push the limits of Wi-Fi connectivity quality and provide advanced latency management. The company also wants internet service providers to focus on innovating for the gaming community.

What exactly is the Wi-Fi Beacon 10?

Built on the Qualcomm Networking Pro Series platforms, the Wi-Fi Beacon 10 is designed to embed unique latency and queuing technology to give service providers a powerful Wi-Fi gateway solution. The goal isn’t necessarily to compete with a wired internet connection — it’s to reduce latency to manageable levels, no matter the quality of your connection.

“While we are not a consumer-facing brand, we do ship tens of millions of Wi-Fi enabled home routers every year, to service providers all around the world,” Gino Dion, Nokia’s head of innovation solutions, tells Digital Trends. “This event allows us to showcase that if residential broadband consumers want a top gaming experience, they don’t have to spend over $1,000 for a ‘gaming router.’ The ISP-provided router (also being from Nokia),