The WiFi 7 specification has been officially published, so the first certified devices can now hit the market.
Billions of users have already said goodbye to cables, thanks mainly to WiFi speed improvements ; However, there is still much room for improvement, and the standard receives new versions constantly. The latest is WiFi 7, which has been in development for four years but has finally been officially launched.
WiFi 7 is the successor to WiFi 6E, and was first introduced in 2020 under the name 802.11be Extremely High Throughput; a name that gives clues to the priority in this version of the protocol: adapting to a world in which we have many connected devices in our home. No matter how fast our connection is, if we connect the mobile phone, the computer, the smart TV, the tablet, the appliances, and the console, it will go wrong; WiFi 7 was born to solve this problem .
To do this, WiFi 7 now uses twice as much bandwidth as the previous generation, going from 160 MHz to 320 MHz; Furthermore, it is based on the 6 GHz band , while previous versions of the protocol were based on 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz. In other words, there is more ‘space’ for all our devices, but that is not the only improvement in that direction. WiFi 7 also supports Multi-Link Operation (MLO), a technology that allows the transmission and reception of data simultaneously using multiple link points.
Faster WiFi is coming
Ultimately, WiFi 7 should be just what users with many devices in their home have been waiting for. Wireless networks with this protocol should be more reliable, lose less data, and offer lower latency ; On this last point, it also introduces improved deterministic latency support, which puts latency within predictable ranges, something especially useful for real-time applications such as augmented or mixed reality glasses.
To all this we must add that WiFi 7 will be faster ; On paper, the theoretical limit would be 40 Gbps, although manufacturers such as Qualcomm clarify that in practice we can expect transfer speeds of 5.8 Gbps in real use. Even so, that would already represent an important leap that should allow the downloading and uploading of high definition video files without problems.
Today’s announcement may be somewhat confusing to readers who have already seen WiFi 7 products on the market; That’s because some companies have gotten ahead of the official launch and created products based on the preliminary specifications released so far. The Wi-Fi Alliance, the consortium of companies dedicated to the development of this technology, advises that true products compatible with WiFi 7 will have to pass certification, and will be recognizable by a seal with the words “WiFi 7 Certified” that will appear on the box or the product website. Approximately 233 million devices will be certified by the end of 2024. Current devices that already boast WiFi 7 will likely work well with other WiFi 7 products, but at the moment they are not certified to do so.
