It’s decided: the Wi-Fi Alliance will ratify the standardization of Wi-Fi 7 before the end of the first quarter of 2024. This means that the standard will be set in stone, and that manufacturers who had anticipated this ratification by marketing their products will finally be able to propose definitive firmware (internal software).
It must be said that this ratification was long overdue, because it has been almost a year since wifi chip manufacturers (Mediatek, Qualcomm, Realtek, Intel, etc.) presented their solutions and demonstrated the performance of their chips. Manufacturers of smartphones and routers have followed suit, since Xiaomi or Google smartphones are available, as are routers, notably from TP-Link, Eero and Netgear recently.
A theoretical flow multiplied by 4.8
The Wi-Fi Alliance therefore confirms the new features of wifi 7, which we presented to you extensively in a dedicated file last year, and which therefore include:
- A bandwidth of 320 MHz instead of 160 MHz for wifi 6 (theoretical speed doubled)
- The transition to 4096 QAM frequency modulation (+ 20% theoretical throughput)
- Introduction of MLO (frequency band aggregation) technology for latency reduction.
Added to this is the possibility for routers to manage up to 16 data streams compared to 8 for the WiFi 6 standard, which brings the theoretical throughput of routers to 46 Gb/s, compared to 9.6 Gb/s currently.
Variable integration on our devices
However, remember that the vast majority of our smartphones or laptops can only manage two data streams, which brings their theoretical throughput to 5.8 Gb/s, compared to 2.4 Gb/s in wifi 6.
You will need to be careful at first, because some entry-level WiFi 7 chips will not manage the bandwidth of 320 MHz, being limited to 160 MHz; furthermore, MLO management might be absent.
We should be able to offer you a test in real conditions of wifi 7 very soon. To do this, we had to update all the network devices in our test protocol with a 10 gigabit PCIe card and an M.2 Wi-Fi 7 BE200 card from Intel. The first wifi 7 product tested will be the Deco BE85 mesh kit from TP-Link.