1y ago

Wi-Fi 7 to get the final seal of approval early next year, new standard is up to 4.8 times faster than Wi-Fi 6

www.tomshardware.com Wi-Fi 7 to get the final seal of approval early next year, new standard is up to 4.8 times faster than Wi-Fi 6

Better later than never?

Wi-Fi 7 to get the final seal of approval early next year, new standard is up to 4.8 times faster than Wi-Fi 6::There are a lot of 'draft' Wi-Fi 7 devices around, but 'Wi-Fi 7 Certified' devices will only come to market sometime next year.

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How am I supposed to keep track without the two letter suffix that's non sequential?
- Look at mister fancy pants over here with 2 letters while the rest of us are using the totally understandable "b" or "g" or "n."
  
  AX gang all day, baybee.
  
  802.11b will always be my favorite. Brings me back to a simpler time.
- I like the 802.11 scheme. :(
  
  I'm only mad that they changed it because I put the effort in to learn the 802.11 standard.
- Whoever is behind USB version naming schemes, please take notice.
  
  they have? And both wifi and UsB is still a mess to understand under the name.

People will rush out to buy the newest thing and it won’t change performance with their fancy router in the basement. People have no clue how to set up networks properly.
- Well, then they have to rush out to buy a new, fancy router for the basement to support their newest thing. And round and round we go...
- Well all they need is a router that supports that standard and devices that support that standard. However, I don't know if the devices have that standard yet, but, when they do, it should be useable.

I just upgraded to a WiFi 6E router. Both my phone and my laptop support 6E.
Speeds are great, until you leave the living room (where the router is). Go up to my bedroom, and 6E won't even connect. So it's fast, but 6Hz has trouble going through walls.
Most of the other devices in the house are on 5GHz and that's still super fast and able to reach basically everywhere.
- the difference between 5Ghz (5150-5895) and 6Ghz (5925-7125) is not really sufficient to blame for most home uses. It's expected as a rule to lose about 10-20% more power than 5Ghz through walls (where 5Ghz lost 100% more power than 2.4 Ghz does). It's much more likely that your new WAP just does less power or worse antenna than the old one did.
  
  Whats a wired access point called?
- Almost certainly because your router isn't broadcasting at full power (30dbm or 1w).

Damn, I don't think I even have WiFi 6 yet, haha. I've just not had any need for faster speeds.
I'm sure something will come along that'll make use of it though!
- Wait till you’re streaming 8k video in each eye of your VR headsets. And, the whole family is watching in their headsets. You’ll need it some day.
  
  That's why I'm dropping fiber in my house when I do my ethernet drops. Might as well pull 2 wires and future-proof it.
  
  8k Video in each eye.
  Not even 5 minutes in - your internet throttles back to 56kbps because you hit the data cap.
- This is primarily meant to replace wired local data transfer solutions like thunderbolt. Example, sending video data from a camera to an editing workstation.
  The transfer speed of WiFi 7 is just over Thunderbolt 3.
  
  The transfer speed of WiFi 7 is just over Thunderbolt 3.
  This is so wrong that it's absurd it's been here for 3 hours and nobody has called it out. The claim is "more than 40Gbps" (I believe 46Gbps is the number floating around) for wifi7. This will likely require 8x8 at 320MHz or even possibly 16x16 ( I don't remember if this was floated as an idea or not) which would require more or less the entire frequency range. Fine... But that's 46Gbps aggregate, meaning for up and down speeds. The split would then be 23/23 gbps, this is paper best case.
  The reality is that you're going to lose about 50% of that off the top because wireless always does. So 12/12 if you're lucky.
  What speeds does Thunderbolt 3 support? 40/40... 80gbps aggregate on paper. 22/22 in practice for a data-only channel (other modes can still access 40/22 quite readily). It's not even close.
  
  Woah. I assume Thunderbolt will still have latency benefits. For example, we're not going to have wireless eGPUs, surely? I hope I'm wrong, because wireless PCIe lanes would be amazing.

I am just glad that 6E and 7 have access to 6GHz so that once my devices support it i can disable both 2.4 and 5GHz to lower interference from neighboring networks. The higher it goes in frequency the less interference everyone will get.
- Less RF interference, sure, but a lot more wall and physical object interference as the higher frequencies aren't able to go through them nearly as well.
  Overall, it's great to have more spectrum available, especially in a less crowded range. More options means more optimal solutions to be had.
  
  Just wait until we enter the gamma spectrum, then it should be quite penetrative.
  
  Thats true. And the higher it goes the more money you have to spend to properly network. I have heard 60GHz requires you to be in the same room as the AP but gives fantastic speeds. What i eventually plan on doing is buying say a 24 port PoE switch and running 2 cables to the ceiling in each room (for redundancy) and putting an AP in every room. I know that will cost a good chunk of money, but with an AP in every room that would future proof the network for higher and higher frequencies in the future.
- It'd be real freakin awesome if every IoT device didn't still rely on 2.4Ghz
  
  Cheaper wi-fi NIC for cheap devices. Won’t change. Those devices use so little bandwidth and often are placed all over the house so 2.4G’s greater ability to pass through walls / floors makes 2.4G ideal for those devices.
  
  Tell me about it. I find that stupid as hell.
  
  It's a good excuse to use your old router on a separate network for those devices. If you have a smart enough switch, you can even keep them completely off your LAN, which can be good for security. YMMV though, and if you need direct access it won't work that way.
- You wont want to disable 2.4 and 5GHz on wifi 7. The reason it gets so much higher speeds than 6e is that it can send data on all 3 spectrum simultaneously. If you turn off 2.4 and 5GHz you would essentially be limiting yourself to 1/2 speed.
  
  Yeah, it can do that. On cellular its called carrier aggrigation. However imo only having access to 320MHz of 6GHz spectum (3.2GBPS) is fine.
  
  93A1A71EABD6B6CD658458CC1F4
- Some day most people will upgrade their devices and it will become smarter to go back to 5GHz
  Would be funny, anyway
  
  Maybe, bur doubtful since lower frequency goes farther

Maybe I will finally be able to afford a WiFi 6E router now.
- Exactly my thought. I need another omada ap and the 6e stuff is overpriced

"Wi-Fi 7 supports superior connectivity for emerging use cases with high levels of interactivity and immersion,"
How far can I be from the access point and how many walls can there be in between? WiFi at home is already pretty bad just two rooms over from the router.
- It's really just the nature of the beast. For higher throughput you need higher frequency. Higher frequency means less pentatration
  
  At some point we'll have 1TB/s but it will require the devices to be kissing each other.
  (Or we just move to light - LiFi)
  
  Hue

Meanwhile today I get an ad from eero for a WiFi 7 router system that costs $1699

What do I need a wireless connection many times faster than my internet for? Streaming game rendering to future VR goggles?
- Most people don't, and that's OK. You'll just upgrade whenever your current equipment breaks down.
  But businesses will be a large market share for increased speeds.
  
  me over hear with my gigabit-ethernet plugs in every wall as if they were as important as electricity... upgrade those suckers to 10-gig-ethernet, and wifi-has nothing over other than mobility... mobility until you leave the room.. sounds about like being on a wire.
  wireless needs a better understanding, and for most that have no understanding they just see faster as better, when no wireless is better than a wired connect, that is why the cellar towers, fiber connection, and even coax-connections all are needed to "power the wireless".
  i'm shocked at how many new or remodeled homes have no "ethernet port" but yet they will have power plugs-n-mass every where in the house, electricity for everything, and then they plugin 5Ghz repeaters into all the wall sockets so that they get decent room to room speeds.

Will I be able to use it in another room? Because wow wifi 5 was awful, and 6 isn't that much better.
- Generally as wireless tech gets faster, it's less able to travel distances or penetrate stuff
  
  That's the most frustrating thing. I have 3 mesh waps in my house, but if you connect in a different room you get 2.4ghz. At this point I need a mesh wap in every room.
  As the wavelengths get shorter, so too does my patience :/
- That really depends on the router you have, my wifi 6 works in all rooms

So this will just be like a firmware patch or something for my new wifi 6 routers I'm guessing right?
- It's an entirely new standard, so no, it won't just be a firmware patch.

Wifi 6 has become pretty affordable but the high speed 6E is still super expensive.
Is 7 an innovation or just more antennas and processing power usage?
- Yeah, I'll be waiting for some coverage to see how it actually is.

Do I have to have played Wi-Fi 1 though 6 in order to understand 7?

Early adoption might be expensive.
I’ll wait as I put in WiFi 6E last year. I get 500-800mbps. I positioned 3 units through out. My laptops support WiFi 6 and 6E. So…no reason to upgrade since they cannot hit the higher speeds without direct line or adapter.
- Even Wifi 6E devices are way too expensive still, especially considering how poor 6GHz range is without a mesh system. I just upgraded to a new router since my old one would bottleneck my internet connection on wired, not because I needed faster wifi speeds.

I'm still on Wi-Fi 4.

In theory, this should be like having wireless Thunderbolt. Hopefully cameras are quick to adopt this. This would be super handy for sending 8K video to a workstation.

Always wondered about penetration and signal length. Does beat 2.4Ghz, still?
- Speed is higher on 5GHz and 6GHz because the channels are wider. For every 10MHz of channel width you can get ~100mbps if there is no interference. 2.4GHz goes so far that it is pretty much impossible to get a channel with no interference and speeds suffer for it. 5GHz has much more bandwidth and lower range so you are much more likely to find a free channel to use unless you live in an apartment building or such. 6GHz has even larger bandwidth available and goes even less distance than 5GHz, though not much less, so finding a free channel should be even easier.
- Lower frequency have longer distance coverage, higher frequency have better speeds but shorter distance coverage, and here is common wavelengths of WiFi 2.4GHz 5GHz 6GHz, also new WiFi stands adds new features like mi-mo was added in WiFi 5 and something something raycasting WiFi was added in WiFi 6 and i honestly don't know what been added in WiFi 7 but specs gonna be better for sure
- Pretty sure length is important for penetration. Wait... what were we talking about?
- If the cause of the poor 2.4ghz range was tons of interference on that band, then maybe. But lower frequencies simply go farther, so 6ghz will always have a lot shorter range than 2.4ghz. Though while it's impossible to change the laws of physics, it might be possible to change the laws around wireless telecommunication to allow it to transmit at a much higher power - not sure if WiFi 7 does.

91 comments