The Taiwanese manufacturer MediaTek has demonstrated, for the first time, the promising capabilities of Wi-Fi 7, which could equip products intended for sale as early as 2023.
Within weeks, the timeline for the new Wi-Fi 7 standard changed. While we thought that the commercial standard IEEE 802.11be could be published in 2024 only, for a market launch of equipped products the same year, or even in 2025, MediaTek made an even earlier announcement. The semiconductor company now claims that the first devices equipped with Wi-Fi 7 ” should happen ” on the market from 2023. Tomorrow or almost, therefore.
Speeds 2.4 times higher than Wi-Fi 6, and strong resistance to interference and other congestion
On the occasion of its announcement, MediaTek performed a demo aiming to impress us incidentally, but above all in order to show how its Wi-Fi 7 Filogic technology is able to exploit the full potential of the standard. IEEE 802.11be, with multi-link operation (or MLO) technology. Wi-Fi 7 promises higher speeds and lower latencies compared to Wi-Fi 6, and especially compared to the latest, already high-performance standard, namely Wi-Fi 6E.
MLO technology brings a real advantage in that it aggregates several channels on different frequency bands at the same time (2.4 GHz, 5 GHz and 6 GHz), which will facilitate the flow of network traffic. This will even be the case when the bands are overloaded or if there is interference, for example caused by your neighbours’ networks. In this sense, we will get closer than ever, with Wi-Fi 7, to the “real” speeds of our internet boxes.
MediaTek maintains its previous statements and still mentions speeds up to 2.4 times higher in Wi-Fi 7 compared to Wi-Fi 6, even with the same number of antennas. How? ‘Or’ What ? Because Wi-Fi 7 is capable of using wide 320 MHz channels. And it’s pretty good of its kind, as it supports 4K quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) technology. This consists of a technology for modulating a signal making it possible to increase data rates. We are talking about theoretical speeds of up to 30 Gbits/s!
Social connections, games and entertainment… The future beneficiaries of Wi-Fi 7
” MediaTek’s Wi-Fi 7 technology will be the backbone of home, office and industrial networks “says the Taiwanese manufacturer, who even refers to this new standard as the successor to the wired network (and therefore Ethernet).
As far as uses are concerned, we are obviously thinking of emerging technologies which, tomorrow, will prevail. The examples are numerous, with augmented reality, virtual reality, the metaverse, calls and video in 4K, streaming in 8K, and all other activities carried out in real time. Social connections, entertainment and real-time gaming are the big families that consumers will be able to take full advantage of with the rise of the Wi-Fi 7 standard.
MediaTek is one of the companies that today is in the Wi-Fi Alliance. This group owns the Wi-Fi brand and contributes to its development, along with Huawei, Apple, Qualcomm, Samsung Electronics, Intel, Dell, Nokia and others.
Source: MediaTek
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