Here’s what you can expect in terms of benefits with the upcoming Wi-Fi 7 devices.
The wireless network is in all probability the lifeblood of both your home’s and your office’s connected devices.
If there are bottlenecks or a poor connection, it can dull the user experience with even the fastest mobile or laptop.
Therefore, you must keep a close eye on the emerging Wi-Fi 7 standard, which will soon be ready to bring the latest in network technology to the masses.
What is Wi-Fi 7?
The days when wireless network standards were only marketed as cumbersome numbers and letter combinations are not over, but efforts have been made to move away from the cryptic designations such as IEEE 802.11ax (also known as Wi-Fi 6) or the upcoming Wi-Fi 7 standard, which still has the technical name 802.11be, which has also been given another name, EHT (Extremely High Throughput wireless).
A dear child with many names, then, but it is now mostly characterized by being the replacement for the Wi-Fi 6 and Wi-Fi 6E standards, which debuted in 2019.
The Wi-fi 7 standard is not yet fully defined but is only expected to be finally adopted sometime in 2024.
However, the basic technologies, such as 320 MHz channels as well as, 4K QAM and 6GHz frequency bands, have already been built into a range of devices, which, among others, the network manufacturer TP-Link has unveiled.
These will be able to be acquired sometime in 2023, but you should not expect the broad rollout until sometime in 2024.
There are many gains
Measured in terms of speed, Wi-Fi 6 was a relatively mild overhaul compared to Wi-Fi. Where the maximum speeds that are supported came up to 7 Gbit/second, while with Wi-Fi 6 the 9.6 Gbps was rounded off.
Here, the big gains lay particularly in security and the ability to support many devices at once.
With Wi-Fi 7, however, significant overhauls are promised on all significant parameters.
The top speed almost quadruples here with up to 36 Gbps speeds per access point, while the individual device can pull up to 5.8 Gbps against 2.4 Gbps with Wi-Fi 6.
At the same time, the Wi-Fi 7 standard is still in development, and speeds of over 40 Gbps are on the drawing board.
Dizzying speeds are not, however, reserved for the individual device. Where Wi-Fi 6 and Wi-Fi 5 allow 15 devices to connect to the network at the same time, Wi-Fi 7 provides a connection to 64 at once.
At the same time, the new 320 Mhz bandwidth and access to the wide 6 GHz spectrum mean that the neighbour’s router does not interfere with your massive upload and download speeds.
At the same time, work is being done with a new concept called ‘puncturing’, which can divide a band into parts that can be used, even if outside interference disturbs parts of the frequency band.
When?
Although Wi-Fi 7 is not expected to be fully baked until 2024, that does not prevent individual manufacturers from making a stealth start with devices that make use of some of the many technologies that Wi-Fi 7 has up its sleeve.
Here, TP-Link is already out with a collection which can be pre-ordered from 31 December this year.
However, these will not be ready for sale until the following months, and TP-Link does not have a real launch date either.