Wi-Fi 7 may be closer than you think

Last year, Intel and Broadcom performed the first cross-vendor Wi-Fi 7 demonstration, with an Intel-based laptop with Wi-Fi 7 connected to a Broadcom Wi-Fi 7 access point. This summer, EnGenius Technologies launched what it said was the first cloud Wi-Fi 7 access point for enterprises.

While the company (EnGenius) says it will have products available later this year, many in the industry expect that we’ll start seeing new standards-based and Wi-Fi Alliance-certified Wi-Fi 7 products hitting the market in 2024. Even so, given the time it takes to evaluate and purchase IT products, now may be the best time for enterprises to start considering Wi-Fi 7.

Why are people interested in Wi-Fi 7? After all, both Wi-Fi 6 and Wi-Fi 6E bring improved performance and higher maximum throughput, but are relatively new to the market. Enterprise equipment based on each standard has only become widely used in the past few years.

The main appeal of Wi-Fi 7 is that many of the performance enhancements and other improvements offered by Wi-Fi 6 are even more powerful in Wi-Fi 7.

What's driving the need for higher-performance Wi-Fi?

Traffic carried by Wi-Fi networks has increased roughly fourfold in four years. In contrast, wired network traffic has grown only slightly over the same period.

Enterprise users are using more bandwidth-intensive applications all the time.

This is supported by comments made during a recent Network Computing Editorial webinar. Namely, one attendee noted in response to a question, “Before the pandemic, I would say 90 to 95 percent of my conference calls were dial-up. After the pandemic, I haven’t made a single call. Everything is Zoom, WebEx, and Teams meetings, no matter what, even if it can be done over the phone. Is that what others are seeing?”

Why is this a problem? As the number of users grows and traffic increases, performance issues arise. Contention for limited bandwidth reduces bandwidth per user, increases latency, and introduces jitter. All of these issues especially impact modern applications that rely on streaming data and video. Users' applications demand more bandwidth and better responsiveness.

Wi-Fi 6 and 6E attempt to address these needs. One difference between Wi-Fi 6 and Wi-Fi 5 is that devices can take advantage of the 2.4 GHz band (in addition to the 5 GHz band supported by previous-generation devices) to increase capacity. In addition, Wi-Fi 6 supports traffic prioritization, beamforming, and orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) to improve performance. For example, OFDMA improves performance in dense environments by allowing smaller packets to be mixed with larger packets that might be used for video streaming. This provides a deterministic, consistent experience on the network.

Another factor is that Wi-Fi 6E-enabled devices can use an additional 1,200 MHz of spectrum in the unlicensed 6 GHz band.

There is currently a lot of interest in Wi-Fi 6 and 6E, according to the latest Network Computing Network Management Survey, which found that 21% of the 336 IT manager respondents have already purchased Wi-Fi 6 and 6E equipment, 13% plan to purchase within the next 12 months, and 23% are evaluating.

These numbers include all types of devices (endpoint devices, routers, access points, etc.). Perhaps a more telling indicator of the importance of the technology in the enterprise, 40% of respondents said they plan to purchase Wi-Fi 6 and 6E access points in the next year.

Others are also seeing strong demand for the sixth generation of Wi-Fi. IDC predicts that two-thirds of Wi-Fi shipments this year will be Wi-Fi 6 or Wi-Fi 6E. IDC expects more growth in the coming years. "Growth is all happening in layers as more Wi-Fi 6 and 6E devices come into play, Wi-Fi 7 chips increase in high-end devices and access points, and the trend toward more discrete Wi-Fi solutions in major client devices," said Phil Solis, research director for connectivity and smartphone semiconductors at IDC, in a released statement.

Enter Wi-Fi 7

Compared to Wi-Fi 6, Wi-Fi 7 will provide significantly higher performance for enterprise users and can support more users in denser environments. Li Xiang, industry solution marketing engineer at Keysight Technologies, said: "We expect Wi-Fi 6 to have a 4.8-fold increase in connection speed and a maximum theoretical data rate of 46Gpbs." In addition, Wi-Fi 7 will provide less than 5 milliseconds of latency. This is more than 100 times better than Wi-Fi 6. Li also pointed out that Wi-Fi 7's network capacity will be five times that of Wi-Fi 6.

Such performance improvements make Wi-Fi 7 ideal for streaming applications and reducing congestion in crowded environments. As a result, more users can run more bandwidth-intensive and latency-dependent applications without performance issues. From another perspective, enterprises can support more users with fewer access points. This translates into lower management costs.

Wi-Fi 7's performance gains will be due to several factors.

First, Wi-Fi 7 routers, access points, and devices will likely take full advantage of the 6 GHz band provided by Wi-Fi 6E.

These devices will feature new technologies, including automatic frequency coordination, multi-link operation and 4K quadrature amplitude modulation (4K QAM), that squeeze more capacity out of wireless networks, reduce latency and make Wi-Fi networks more responsive, or as some like to say, wired-style responsive.