About four years after the debut of Wi-Fi 6, the next generation of wireless, Wi-Fi 7, is picking up the baton. Based on the upcoming IEEE standard 802.11be, dubbed – no pun intended – Extremely High Throughput (EHT), the new technology is packing more than a few tricks up its sleeve to speed things up, cut through interference, and drop the latency of the network. Think of the wireless network as a highway with cars and delivery trucks – let’s see how Wi-Fi 7 is going to make their movement better and more efficient!
The first good news is that while Wi-Fi 7 primarily aims to meet the increasing demands of modern connectivity and mobility, it will continue to build on the backward compatibility of its predecessors, meaning that the new access points will still work just fine with older client devices. It still operates on the 2.4 GHz, 5 GHz, and 6 GHz bands.
That being said, Wi-Fi 7 will further expand upon the 6 GHz connectivity that began with Wi-Fi 6E, and take it up a notch with a host of new features offering more potential bandwidth (faster downloads), bundling connections across bands (faster downloads and more stability), and using more signal modulation tricks for dealing with congestion. This should not only enable faster speeds, but dramatically improve responsiveness and reliability for future usages that demand extreme consistency and precision.
Now, let’s take a closer peek at the specific features of Wi-Fi 7
The following are the key features and enhancements that will empower enterprise IT teams to more effectively support an increased number of devices, users, and bandwidth-intensive applications, while also catering to low-latency apps. To make it easier to understand the specific mechanisms, let’s draw an analogy for each of these new functionalities:
- 320 MHz wide channels. For starters, the expanded channel bandwidth and additional capacity provided by the 6 GHz spectrum significantly enhances network speed and throughput. While Wi-Fi 6E increased channel width in the 6 GHz band to 160 MHz, Wi-Fi 7 introduces ultrawide 320 MHz channels, effectively doubling data transmission capacity. It’s like using a semi-truck instead of a moving van to pack more data into each transmission.
- Multi-Link Operation (MLO). While previous generations of Wi-Fi allowed access to multiple wireless bands such as 2.4 GHz or 5 GHz, devices could typically choose only one band to make transmissions, and switch to another if conditions changed. With Multi-Link Operation (MLO), devices can simultaneously connect on multiple bands, enabling faster speeds by aggregating bandwidth. Additionally, both bands can be used concurrently to share redundant/unique data for improved reliability with ultra-low and precise latencies. In that sense, legacy Wi-Fi devices can be compared to moving vans that can only take one highway at a time and choose alternate routes if they run into traffic, while Wi-Fi 7 semi-trucks will simultaneously operate across not one, but two highways – ensuring that the arrival of critical cargo won’t be impacted by potential delays.
- 4K-QAM. 4K-QAM (Quadrature Amplitude Modulation) enables each signal to more densely embed greater amounts of data compared to the 1K-QAM available in Wi-Fi 6 and Wi-Fi 6E. This can improve data transmission rates up to 20% compared to the last gen. Imagine having professional movers optimize truck cargo space to pack the maximum number of boxes. In other words, you can now upload and download more data in the same timeframe as before.
- Multiple Resource Units (MRU) and Puncturing. Wi-Fi 6 introduced a multi-user efficiency capability called Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA) which can be compared to an expressway where lanes can be dynamically resized and allocated to different vehicles based on size and destination. However, the spectrum resource could be wasted if the channel encounters signal interference. When any part of a large high-speed channel is being used by another device, the entire channel becomes unavailable. With MRU and Puncturing, Wi-Fi 7 devices will be able to take full advantage of the remaining part of the channels that is not being used or interrupted. Imagine that the aforementioned movers are also able to re-pack most of the semi-truck contents into smaller trucks, without having to avoid a partially used multi-lane highway so they can deliver boxes to the destination more quickly and reliably.
When will Wi-Fi 7 be available?
It's already here! When the IEEE first announced the draft of the standard back in March 2021, manufacturers started building technology. Final ratification of the standard is expected later this year, but the Wi-Fi Alliance, the agency tasked with ensuring interoperability amongst Wi-Fi products, announced its certification program, Wi-Fi CERTIFIED 7, in January 2024 as technical requirements around the standard are essentially complete.
With this certification program launching, the expectation is additional devices, access points, and routers will start coming out more steadily. In fact, Extreme Networks announced its first enterprise Wi-Fi 7 access point as early as in January!
Should you invest in Wi-Fi 7?
With over 20 billion Wi-Fi devices already in use globally, the Wi-Fi Alliance anticipates that the number of Wi-Fi 7 devices will reach over 233 million by the end of 2024, with expectations to surge to 2.1 billion by 2028. In addition to that number, the analyst firm 650 Group predicts that over 13 million enterprise-grade Wi-Fi 7 APs are expected by 2027.
As we transition into the era of 6 GHz Wi-Fi connectivity, you may consider investing in Wi-Fi 7 or Wi-Fi 6E technologies to future-proof your network for the upcoming five years. Utilizing the 6 GHz spectrum is crucial for enhancing bandwidth and capacity, reducing network latency and most importantly, ensuring a superior quality Wi-Fi user experience!