Wi Fi 7: What is it and when do you expect it to appear

Less than a month ago, the Wi Fi Alliance announced the certification of Wi Fi 6E (Wi Fi 6Extended), which means that Wi Fi can use the 6GHz frequency band for unauthorized Wi Fi operations. However, despite the industry's celebration of Wi Fi receiving additional spectrum for the first time in 20 years, the next generation of wireless technology has begun to emerge, with the potential to achieve higher data rates and lower latency.

Compared to Wi Fi 6, Wi Fi 7 (or 802.11be) will also use multi band/multi-channel aggregation and operation, and provide higher spectrum and power efficiency, better interference mitigation, higher capacity density, and higher cost efficiency. The seventh generation Wi Fi is also known as Wi Fi with extremely high throughput, as it is expected to support throughput of up to 30Gbps, approximately three times that of Wi Fi 6.

The Wi Fi 7 standard has many proposed features, but direct enhancements to Wi Fi 6 include support for 320MHz transmission (twice the 160MHz of 802.11ax), use of higher modulation orders, optional support for 4096-QAM (higher than 1024-QAM in 802.11ax), and allocation of multiple resource units (such as OFMDA tone sets).

The latter feature mentioned above - the allocation of multiple resource units - will improve spectrum utilization, making Wi Fi 7 an ideal choice for the enterprise sector as they continue their digital transformation by adding AR/VR, IoT, and IIoT applications to their workflows. In addition, Wi Fi 7 may improve support for applications that require deterministic latency, high reliability, and quality of service (QoS).

In addition, Wi Fi 7 will also be optimized for video applications, which is not only valuable in the enterprise field, but also can meet the use cases of gaming, streaming, and other smart home devices and services within the home.

And attention to videos is crucial, as it is expected that videos will soon become the mainstream type of traffic. In fact, Cisco's Visual Network Index shows that by 2022, IP video traffic will account for 82% of all IP traffic, including businesses and consumers.

IEEE plans to release the 802.11ba amendment at some point in 2024, along with commercial deployment. Then, just like Wi Fi 6 and 6E, the Wi Fi Alliance will release its Wi Fi 7 certification program to ensure interoperability and security standards.

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