Wireless connections do not stop evolving in a market that does not stop, and although the WiFi 6E is practically taking its first steps, we already have a new standard looming on the horizon. And it doesn’t have much to go. Its about WiFi 7, or 802.11be, and it should be with us around 2024. That’s what estimates from experts like Intel say.
And like every new iteration in this type of connection, sensible improvements are expected in many aspects, but above all in terms of speed. If what we have known now, through a new ‘paper’ published in ArXiv, is correct, what we will obtain with WiFi 7 is a new generation of wireless connections up to four times faster than today’s fastest.
More bandwidth, more speed, less latency
Regarding the spectrum, the WiFi 7 will respect the one currently used by the WiFi 6E and that covers up to 7.125GHz, that is, covering the entire 6GHz band. But in addition to this, which remains, there will be improvements in the width of the channels as we will go from 160MHz to 320MHz, and MIMO will also double, so we will have up to 16 streams at our service.
As for signal modulation, with WiFi 7 we will have 4096-QAM, continuing with OFDMA. We continue with the bandwidth, another of the great improvements of WiFi 7 and that will allow us to have up to 30Gbps at our disposal, although Intel affirms that Theoretical 48Gbps can be reachedWe’ll see when the standard is working. With this bandwidth we are at the level of USB 4 with its 40Gbps, so we are talking about a considerable capacity.
With WiFi 7 will come the MLO or ‘Multi-Link Operation’, a kind of carrier aggregation but for WiFi networks and that will allow WiFi 7 to simultaneously use the 2.4GHz, 5GHz and 6GHz channels. The first data, such as those provided by Carlos Cordeiro (CTO of Wireless Connectivity), point to speeds up to 7.2 times higher than those of WiFi 6. Not bad, at least on paper.
This aggregation of channels in the WiFi must guarantee reduce latency by allowing data packets to be transferred on different channels at the same time, so the response speed of the network will be another factor improved with the arrival of WiFi 7. All this must arrive on board the future WiFi 7 for, we repeat, the year 2024 approximately. We will see if the forecasts for both dates and characteristics are met.
Via | ArXiv