Everything you need to know about Wi-Fi 7
Barely a year after the release of the Wi-Fi 6E in 2021, Wi-Fi 7 has become the talk of the tech town. With augmented reality and cloud gaming gaining a lot of attention, Wi-Fi 7 can help ensure a smooth and lag-free experience.
When Broadcom and Intel recently demonstrated the truly astonishing potential of Wi-Fi 7, the industry wasn’t expecting such a giant leap in Wi-Fi technology just a year after Wi-Fi 6E. It's natural to assume that a newer digit added to the Wi-Fi naming standard may not offer anything substantial, but one would be mistaken to shrug this off as just another day in the tech world.
Let's take a look at why Wi-Fi 7 is being touted as a game changer and why it truly deserves the attention of enthusiasts and average users.
Wi-Fi 7 technical specifications
Wi-Fi 7's technical IEEE standard is 802.11be. Alternatively, the industry is also calling it the EHT standard, which means Extremely High-Throughput. It is interesting to note that the industry has adopted an entirely new number for 802.11be rather than calling it a new form of Wi-Fi 6. As we'll see, it's for a good reason.
Theoretical peak speeds
First and foremost, Wi-Fi 7 promises a theoretical peak transfer rate of close to 36 Gbps. That's almost four times the peak speed of what Wi-Fi 6E currently offers. For the average user, these numbers offer little to no practical advantage other than downloading and streaming at blazing-fast speeds, but there's more than meets the eye here.
The newer Wi-Fi standard has managed to double the channel bandwidth to a whopping 320 MHz compared to 160 MHz from Wi-Fi 6E. Having more channel bandwidth reduces network bandwidth congestion. The available throughput increases as a result of this, and the latency gets reduced as well. Gamers, especially those who enjoy competitive online games, will have unbelievably low ping when playing online using the newer Wi-Fi 7.
Additionally, Wi-Fi 7 will offer a 6 GHz band for even faster operation, with next to no interference from any nearby devices.
MLO changes the game forever
The latest Wi-Fi standard also comes equipped with a newer connecting technology called MLO, which stands for Multi-link Operations.
As is commonly known, a modern device today can connect either with a 2.4 GHz band or a 5 GHz band from a router. One band goes completely unused while the other is connected, and devices that are connected to a slower bands (like 2.4 GHz) usually get less speed.
The MLO technology in Wi-Fi 7 capitalizes on these unused resources by ensuring simultaneous connections to multiple bands of 2.4, 5, and 6 GHz. This essentially reduces latency by up to 80% and takes throughput to never before seen levels.
MLO will find its use in applications like augmented and virtual reality, cloud gaming, and remote computing.
Up to 16 simultaneous spatial streams using MU-MIMO
Up until Wi-Fi 6E, a router could handle a maximum of eight simultaneous connections without reducing the speed for each. Wi-Fi 7 has managed to double this to a massive 16 devices, while lowering the ping substantially.
To put it simply, if a kitchen has more mouths to feed, the best approach would be to hire more servers, thus ensuring that serving one customer doesn't slow the service to any others.
Better channel utilization with Multi-RU and Preamble Puncturing
Traditionally in Wi-Fi 6 and 6E, a single Resource Unit is allocated to a device for sending and receiving data, which hinders faster and more efficient transmission. To combat this hindrance, the newer Wi-Fi 7 assigns multiple RUs to a single device while also enabling their combination to increase the efficiency of transmission.
For example, let's say a device is transmitting on an 80 MHz band on channel 56. Under older Wi-Fi standards, only the assigned channel 56 would be used to send and receive data. However, with Wi-Fi 7 and its Preamble Puncturing technology, if interference is detected on the assigned channel, the device will be able to use other channels from, say, the 20 MHz band.
Potential use cases
- Industrial IoT
- AR/VR
- Cloud gaming
- Extremely low latency 8K streaming
- Remote and virtual office space
- High-quality multiple user video conferencing
- Metaverse applications
The latest 802.11be standard promises to be a game changer for any application that requires massive data throughputs with ultra-low latency and ping. It is quite reasonable to expect this technology to start appearing in late 2023 and through the entirety of 2024. As for compatibility, 802.11be devices may support Wi-Fi standards going back to as early as 802.11n.
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Siddharth Satish