Imagine being able to download full-length movies in seconds instead of minutes, experiencing flawlessly smooth VR/AR without a hint of lag, enjoying cloud gaming with the responsiveness of a local console, and having a home bustling with smart devices without sacrificing individual connection speeds. You won’t need to imagine for long because this revolutionary wireless technology is just around the corner.
While many of you may have recently upgraded to Wi-Fi 6 or Wi-Fi 6E, their successor, WiFi 7, is already on the horizon and is promising significant advances in connections, speed, and latency.
This blog post gives you a quick overview of what you can expect from WiFi 7, how it compares to its predecessor, and when to realistically expect to upgrade your network.
What is Wi-Fi 7?
Technically known as the 802.11be, WiFi 7 is the latest of the IEEE 802.11 standard. It is the next evolutionary leap in wireless technology, succeeding WiFi 6 and 6E. It works on all three bands - 2.4, 5, and 6 gigahertz (MHz) to make full use of resources.
Aptly dubbed Extremely High Throughput (EHT), it promises a massive jump in speed, offering speeds up to four times faster compared to its predecessors. In addition, it also boasts advancements that reduce latency, increase capacity, and boost stability.
All these features make WiFi 7 exceptionally capable of handling our ever-growing demands for high-quality streaming, immersive extended reality (XR) experiences, and lag-free interactions in our increasingly complex multi-device environment.
WiFi 7 will be backward compatible with previous standards, but to take advantage of the improved performance and features, you will need to upgrade to “Wi-Fi CERTIFIED 7” devices, including routers, access points (APs), laptops, smartphones, etc.
Key Features of Wi-Fi 7
The innovative technologies of WiFi 7 promise to bring significant changes and exciting developments. The following are its most important features:
1. Wider Channels
As mentioned earlier, WiFi 7 works on all three bands( 2.4 GHz, 5 GHz, and 6 GHz), and each band is broken into channels. The wider the channel, the more data it can transmit.
The 2.4-GHz band has 11 channels, each spanning 20 megahertz (MHz). In contrast, the 5-GHz band offers 45 channels, with the flexibility to combine channels into 40-MHz or 80-MHz widths. With the introduction of the 6-GHz band, users gained access to an expanded spectrum offering a total of 60 channels, and in Wi-Fi 6E, these channels expanded to widths of up to 160 MHz.
WiFi 7 unlocks the massive potential of the 6 GHz band by doubling the bandwidth of WiFi 6 and extending the channel width to 320 MHz. This makes it possible to have many more simultaneous data connections at the highest speed.
2. Larger Capacity
To effectively handle the increasing traffic demands of a growing number of Wi-Fi devices, access points (APs) require enhanced spatial multiplexing capabilities.
In Wi-Fi 5 (802.11ac), a spatial multiplexing technique called Multi-User MIMO (MU-MIMO) was introduced. This technique allowed APs to form beams towards multiple clients simultaneously, reducing interference and increasing overall throughput.
Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax) introduced additional spatial multiplexing capabilities with the Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA) technique, enabling more efficient data transmission in dense environments.
Wi-Fi 7 (802.11be) is expected to further improve spatial multiplexing with support for 16 spatial streams, which is significantly more than Wi-Fi 6. This increase in capacity will ensure that all devices on the network have sufficient bandwidth for uninterrupted operation.
3. Faster Speeds
In wireless networks, the transmission and reception of data is done using a method called Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (QAM). The higher the QAM, the greater the amount of information that can be transmitted. WiFi 7 uses 4096-QAM, which is a higher-order modulation scheme, enabling it to achieve 20% higher transmission rates than Wi-Fi 6’s 1024 QAM.
The higher transmission rates allow devices to achieve higher transfer efficiency, so the quality of 4K/8K videos, online games, live streaming, etc. is much better.
4. Multi Resource Units
In previous Wi-Fi standards, such as Wi-Fi 5 and Wi-Fi 6, devices typically operate on specific channels within the available spectrum. When a channel is busy due to activity from other devices, the entire channel may become unavailable, requiring devices to switch to a different channel for communication. This limitation impacts transmission efficiency and flexibility in spectrum resource scheduling.
Wi-Fi 7 addresses these limitations by using advanced technologies such as Multi-User Multiple Input Multiple Output (MU-MIMO) and Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA), which allow devices to better utilize the available spectrum. Additionally, Wi-Fi 7 is also expected to have new features such as spatial reuse, enabling devices to utilize unused parts of the same high-speed channel, thereby improving transmission efficiency and overall network performance.
5. Higher Speed, Lower Latency, Greater Reliability
Traditionally, Wi-Fi devices have operated on one frequency band at a time, which limits their ability to utilize available spectrum efficiently, especially in congested environments where multiple frequency bands may be underutilized. With Multi-Link Operation (MLO), WiFi 7 aims to address this limitation. MLO allows Wi-Fi devices to simultaneously transmit or receive data on multiple non-contiguous frequency bands, effectively increasing the available spectrum and improving network performance. This helps increase throughput, reduce latency, and improve reliability for applications such as VR/ AR, online games, and cloud computing.
What are the benefits of Wi-Fi 7?
From the perspective of an enterprise or home user, all the features above can be summarized into the following key benefits:
Higher throughput
Better support for deterministic latency
Improved efficiency, even in dense networks
Increased reliability, and
Reduced power consumption
How is WiFi 7 different from Wi-Fi 6 and 6E?
While WiFi 6 was created in response to the ever-increasing number of devices in the world, WiFi 7 aims to deliver blazing speeds to all devices with greater efficiency. Although WiFi 6 provided 37% faster speeds, it wasn't as impressive as WiFi 5's 10x speed increase. The difference stemmed from the original intention of the WiFi 6 project, which aimed to improve efficiency rather than data transfer speed. WiFi 7, on the other hand, is designed for higher transfer speeds. WiFi 7 makes huge strides in transmission speed – 480% more than previous generations.
Here’s a table comparing the key features of WiFi 7 with its predecessors:
|
|
WiFi 7 |
WiFi 6E |
Wifi 6 |
Wifi 5 |
|
Launch date |
2024 (expected) |
2021 |
2019 |
2013 |
|
IEEE standard |
802.11be |
802.11ax |
802.11ax |
802.11ac |
|
Max. data transfer rate |
46 Gbps |
9.6 Gbps |
9.6 Gbps |
3.5 Gbps |
|
Frequency |
Tri-band (2.4, 5, 6 GHz) |
Tri-band (2.4, 5, 6 GHz) |
Dual-band (2.4 GHz, 5 GHz |
5 GHz |
|
Channels |
Up to 320 MH |
20, 40, 80, 80+80, 160 MHz |
20, 40, 80, 80+80, 160 MHz |
20, 40, 80, 80+80, 160 MHz |
|
Security |
WPA4 (TBD) |
WPA3 |
WPA3 |
WPA2 |
Should you upgrade to Wi-Fi 7?
WiFi 7 is still in its infancy. As mentioned earlier, even its predecessor, WiFi 6/6E, is just being adopted. So, it will take a while until devices start to default to WiFi 7 and it is advisable to wait until it becomes widely available.
But if your business requires you to stay at the bleeding edge of technology, then you can go ahead and dive into the updated spec with a new networking gear that supports WiFi 7. However, before you dive into it, there are a couple of things you need to know. First, WiFi 7 devices will likely be some of the most expensive network devices you have ever seen. So be prepared to loosen your purse strings. Second, at the time of writing this blog post, the WiFi 7 standard hasn’t yet been adopted by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). (You can check the status of the WiFi 7 standard here). So the network devices may be missing key features or optimizations.
Conclusion
If you struggle with constant buffering, lag, or data congestion, then WiFi 7 may be what you need. But to take advantage of this new wireless technology, you’ll need to wait months or even years. Until then, if you are looking to improve your Wi-Fi, here are our Tips For Improving Your WiFi Network Performance.
Do you need help improving the performance of your wireless network? Is it time to upgrade your WiFi network technology? Reach out to us by clicking the button below to get quotes for your network projects.
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About The Author
Hari SubediMarketing Manager at Jones IT
Hari is an online marketing professional with a focus on content marketing. He writes on topics related to IT, Security, and Small Business. He is also the founder and managing director of Girivar Kft., a business services company located in Budapest, Hungary.