Wi-Fi 7 is on the way, how powerful is it?

In 2019, Samsung and Apple were the first to introduce WiFi6 technology to mobile phones. In just three years, WiFi6 has been rapidly popularized in the mobile phone market, from flagship phones to the thousand-yuan phone market. WiFi6 has almost become a standard feature of mobile phones.

While WiFi6 is not yet fully popularized, the next generation of wireless network technology WiFi 7 is already on the way. This year, Qualcomm, MediaTek and Broadcom have successively launched WiFi 7 wireless products with a maximum speed of 33Gbps, which is a significant improvement over WiFi6.

WiFi 7 improves three core capabilities: high throughput, multi-link, and low latency

WiFi 7 is the upcoming next-generation Wi-Fi standard, also known as IEEE 802.11be or Extremely High Throughput. According to relevant data, WiFi 7 is expected to support up to 30Gbps throughput and a maximum network speed of 46.4Gbps, which is 4.8 times the maximum network speed of 9.6Gbps of WiFi 6. As the "successor" of WiFi 6, WiFi 7 is truly worthy of its name.

The reason for such a high throughput is that WiFi7 has a larger spectrum applicability. It allows the use of spectrum resources from 1GHz to 7.2GHz, and focuses on compatibility with the previous WiFi standard 2.4GHz, 5GHz, and 6GHz frequency bands. The ultra-large spectrum surface achieves a larger theoretical bandwidth, thereby pushing up the limit rate indicator.

Multi-band and multi-link collaboration: This is believed to have a great impact on the future WiFi7 networking, and is also a feature that suppresses WiFi6.

For existing WiFi devices, common functions such as automatic tuning between APs and smart roaming are manufacturer-defined features. The purpose of collaboration between APs is only to optimize channel selection and adjust the load between APs to achieve efficient use and balanced distribution of radio frequency resources.

The coordinated scheduling between multiple APs in WiFi7, including the coordinated planning between cells in the time and frequency domains, the interference coordination between cells, and distributed MIMO, can effectively reduce the interference between APs and greatly improve the utilization of air interface resources. In other words, WiFi7 supports different APs to allow multiple devices with multiple frequency bands to be connected at the same time, while now it can only connect a single device with a single frequency band.

Compared with WiFi6, the new features introduced by WiFi7 undoubtedly bring a wider range of application scenarios. For example, remote office, online video conferencing, cloud games, etc. These new applications have a common feature, that is, they have very high requirements for network throughput and latency. WiFi7 can allow everyone to obtain high-speed access to the network.

In addition, with the emergence of immersive virtual reality network applications such as the "Metaverse", 4K/8K high-definition video, VR/AR require faster network speeds, lower latency, and higher network access throughput. WiFi7 can significantly improve data transmission efficiency and reduce latency, helping the Metaverse industry to land in scenarios.

WiFi7 industry chain is about to start

At this stage, the global WiFi7 technical specifications have not yet been finalized. According to the industry's estimates, mature WiFi7 products will not appear until 2024. However, facing the objective blue ocean market in the future, the leading WiFi chip manufacturers will naturally seize the opportunity. Since 2022, Broadcom, Qualcomm, and MediaTek have successively released WiFi 7 main control chips or demonstrated their related technologies.

As early as MWC2022, Qualcomm took the lead in launching FastConnect 7800, the world's first WiFi 7 product. The Qualcomm FastConnect 7800 subsystem set a new performance benchmark: peak rate reaches 5.8Gbps, latency is less than 2ms, and power consumption is 50% reduced than the previous generation.

On May 4, Qualcomm also launched the world's most scalable commercial WiFi7 network platform product portfolio. This is Qualcomm's third-generation professional networking platform that supports key Wi-Fi7 features including 320MHz channels. It sets a new performance benchmark for wireless networks with a wireless interface capacity of up to 33Gbps and a peak throughput of more than 10Gbps.

Chip giant Broadcom launched its first WiFi 7 SoC in April this year, called BCM4916, which uses a quad-core Armv8 processor with 64KB of L1 cache and 1MB of L2 cache, and can provide 24 DMIPS performance. The SoC supports DDR3 and DDR4 memory, as well as 2.5 Gbps and 10 Gbps network interfaces, and provides a USB 3.2 interface.

In addition, Broadcom also released its WiFi 7 ecosystem product portfolio, including BCM6726 and BCM67263 for consumer products, BCM43740 and BCM73720 for enterprise products, and BCM4398 for mobile devices. BCM6726 supports 2.4, 5 and 6 GHz bands, while BCM67263 only supports 6 GHz band. Currently, in the field of WiFi 7, Broadcom is providing samples to major customers.

On January 29th this year, MediaTek announced the world’s first live demonstration of Wi-Fi 7 technology, highlighting the capabilities of its upcoming Wi-Fi 7 Filogic connectivity portfolio. MediaTek is currently demonstrating two Wi-Fi 7 demos to key customers and industry partners to showcase the technology’s ultra-high speed and low latency transmission.

On the terminal side, ZTE took the lead in launching the world's first Wi-Fi 7 standard 5G CPE product MC888 flagship product at the MWC held in March. It integrates 5G high-speed and Wi-Fi 7 high-concurrency technology, and has the world's highest peak network download rate of 10Gbps. In April, New H3C Group, a subsidiary of Tsinghua Unigroup, launched the world's first enterprise-level intelligent native Wi-Fi 7 AP new products, including WA7638 and WA7338, which support three-band 12 streams and three-band 10 streams, with a maximum transmission rate of 18.44Gbps.