Wi-Fi 7 is almost here. This article will show you what you can expect from the next-gen wireless connectivity standard. This article contains information on when Wi-Fi 7 might start appearing in the gadgets that can be bought, or at least a little insight.
First and foremost, Wi-Fi 7 is a speed upgrade, so hardware supporting the standard is going to be able to shuttle data through the air at a faster rate than before. Technically speaking, we are talking about IEEE 802.11be Extremely High Throughput (EHT), along with the official Wi-Fi 7 moniker expected to be announced in the upcoming future.
In a paper from the IEEE, the standard is described as promising not just faster speeds and more bandwidth, along with the “many more revolutionary changes to Wi-Fi, which will be forming a basement for further evolution of Wi-Fi.” MediaTek is promising that the standard will be a realistic replacement for wired Ethernet connections.
What’s special about the new Wi-Fi 7?
Wi-Fi 7 is going to be operating on the 2.4 GHz, 5 GHz, as well as 6 GHz frequency bands while supporting a transmission rate up to a huge 30 Gbps. Which is quite a leap from the maximum of 9.6 Gbps that Wi-Fi 6E promises. Though as usual, it’s worth bearing in mind that these are theoretical rates, not the ones that you’re likely to receive at home.
Wi-Fi 7 uses plenty a lot of ways to improve performance, one is the use of 320 MHz single-channel bandwidth, up from 160 MHz. This essentially means increased speed as well as throughput for your devices. This combined with the adoption of 6 GHz, there should be less interference between gadgets, which is important with so many phones, tablets, laptops, etc. trying to connect simultaneously.
Another key Wi-Fi spec is latency where improvements are planned, as well. Wi-Fi 7 will deploy various techniques to make sure more data requests can be served with near to no delay. One of the techniques is Multi-Link Operation (MLO). This will introduce a better way for devices to keep multiple online connections across multiple bands active simultaneously.
The technology known as MU-MIMO (Multi-User, Multiple-Input, Multiple-Output) will be playing a role here: The maximum number of supported spatial streams for client devices will be going up from 8 all the way to 16.
Many of the boosts that Wi-Fi 7 brings—to Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN), Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (QAM), and Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiple Access (OFDMA), for example. Require a lot of technical knowledge to properly understand, however, they all help data get shifted faster, to more devices simultaneously, in an even more efficient way.
What Wi-Fi 7 won’t be able to do, improves the internet speeds coming to the place where you live. Until broadband provision improves across the board, these enhanced Wi-Fi technologies are not going to be that noticeable.
It might be a while before we can actually see any devices that have Wi-Fi 7 built-in. While years of work have already been done on this spec, it might not make its official debut before the end of this year. While the consumer hardware is going to be way beyond that. So, you don’t have to worry about your brand-new Wi-Fi 6/Wi-Fi 6E router being out of date anytime soon.
As usual, Wi-Fi 7 devices will be backward compatible. They will work with all your older gear, though of course without all the benefits as well as the speed increases that Wi-Fi 7 brings.
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