If you can't tell the difference between Wi-Fi 5, Wi-Fi 6 and Wi-Fi 6e, look out: Wi-Fi 7 is already on its way.
Taiwanese chipmaker MediaTek(opens in new tab) said last week that it had conducted the first live demonstrations of the next-gen wireless-networking specification, which the Wi-Fi Alliance(opens in new tab) claims will be "capable of supporting a maximum throughput of at least 30 Gbps" when Wi-Fi 7 arrives in the next couple of years.
"The rollout of Wi-Fi 7 will mark the first time that Wi-Fi can be a true wireline/Ethernet replacement for super high-bandwidth applications," MediaTek corporate VP Alan Hsu said in a company press release.
What Is Wi-Fi 7? (And Isn't Wi-Fi 6 Still Cutting Edge?)
Whereas Wi-Fi 6 offers merely incremental speed increases over Wi-Fi 5, Wi-Fi 7 is all about lightning-fast connections. For that reason, industry jargon has settled on "802.11be EHT," for Extremely High Throughput. Here’s why: Although technical specifications are still being worked out, the new standard could deliver nominal peak data rates of more than 40Gbps(Opens in a new window). That's astonishing. To put that in perspective, Wi-Fi 7 will be more than four times faster than Wi-Fi 6 and Wi-Fi 6E, which can hit maximum data rates of 9.6Gbps, and close to six times faster than Wi-Fi 5, which maxes out at 6.9Gbps.
Wi-Fi 7: faster, smarter, and with far less lag
Wi-Fi 6 was optimized for congestion and wireless efficiency, enabling your router to effectively communicate with dozens of wireless devices. Wi-Fi6E weaved in a dedicated 6GHz frequency, adding additional channels for high-bandwidth devices like mesh routers to communicate with one another. If you think of wireless communication as lanes on a freeway, WiFi 6E effectively added a dedicated HOV or commuter lane, allowing high-priority buses and ambulances their own traffic-free channel.
In the real world, though, cars moving down a freeway can re-route themselves to avoid congestion. Until now, Wi-Fi couldn’t. A Wi-Fi 6 router can communicate data on both the 2.4-GHz, 5-GHz, and 6-GHz channels simultaneously, but they’re all independent of one another.
Wi-Fi 7’s most significant improvement is that it transforms the router into a multi-link device. Several physical radios can communicate on separate frequencies, yet Wi-Fi 7 ties them all together underneath a single MAC interface so that an Xbox or a smart speaker simply sees a single device. A Wi-Fi 7 router can simply assign data packets to whatever frequency channel is the least congested, because it simply doesn’t care which frequency it uses.
Put another way, the days of manually configuring a device to be “on” a 2.4-GHz or 5-GHz network appear to be over. Wi-Fi 7 will simply choose which frequency band has the lowest congestion, and send the data over that channel. Qualcomm calls this Alternating Multi-Link, where devices will simply switch back and forth between the available bands. Bouncing back and forth between channels also has implications for power saving, too, according to the IEEE.
In a case where a Wi-Fi 7 router is only “talking” to another device, there’s another option that Qualcomm calls “High Band Simultaneous Multi-Link.” With it, all bands are used simultaneously to blast data across all available radio frequencies. That means what it says; Wi-Fi 7 devices won’t necessarily communicate on, say, a 6GHz channel, they’ll be able to theoretically communicate on all three, at once. (Practically, that won’t happen; the 2.4GHz band will continue to be reserved for slower IoT devices. In the Qualcomm FastConnect 7800, HBS Multi-Link combines four streams across the two 5-and 6-GHz radios, Qualcomm said.)
WiFi 7 release dates
Don’t get too excited about this new specification just yet, it could be until late next year (2023) before we see WiFi 7 devices starting to trickle into the markets. Of course, the first devices to be released will be high-end commercial devices.
There is a caveat also, this new tech will only be available in countries that have authorized use for the 6GHz band, same as WiFi 6E. Major countries that have allowed the use of WiFi 6E and WiFi 7 are Canada, the US, UK, and Brazil.
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