WiFi 7 Approaches

Coming Later This Year?

There are already several cellphones and routers on the market that are WiFi 7 ready, but sadly they have nothing to talk to.  This may change later this year or early next year, Qualcomm, Broadcom and MediaTek have all released working silicon.  The IEEE may not have completely finalized the 802.11be standard, but enough specifications have been decided upon to make it worth getting a jump on the official announcement.  

If WiFi 7 does live up to it’s specifications it will be a huge jump from WiFI 6, as it is expected to deliver betweeen 1376 to 46120 Mbit/s of bandwidth compared to 574 to 9608 Mbit/s.   WiFi 7 will still use the same frequencies, the increase in bandwidth comes from new ways of handling traffic.  Recent WiFi standards all supported multi-channel connectivity but have all had sharing issues, if a part of a channel was in use by a different device then the device dropped that channel completely.  WiFi 7 introduces puncturing, which allows the use of an already occupied channel by switching to an unused portion of that channel, which means it will be able to use most of it’s 60 channels more frequently than previous generations.

Hackaday delves into more of the technology behind it including 4K-QAM, multi-link operation and latency mitigations here.