WiFi 7 for ubiquitous access

It is now common to use mobile communication networks outdoors and wireless local area networks in public places or at home.

The combination of wide area network and local area network constitutes our overall network today. Everyone is already familiar with 4G and 5G in the wide area network. This issue of digital transformation strategy mainly wants to talk about the latter WiFi in the local area network.

In public places or at home, everyone will naturally choose to connect to WiFi, but the public does not have a clear perception of WiFi 6 and WiFi 7. They may only see such key labels when buying a router.

In fact, this year many manufacturers have brought their WiFi 7 products to MWC (Mobile World Congress), which is also a weather vane in the communications field.

So compared to the vagueness of the Metaverse and Web3, we will indeed be able to see the arrival of WiFi 7 in the next three years.

The development of WiFi 7 is completely different from that of communication networks. It is a process of small steps and continuous iterations, which can be seen from every release version of the WiFi 7 standard.

The WiFi Alliance also gave the standard process for WiFi 7. The draft standard 1.0 was released in May 2021, version 2.0 was scheduled for March 2022, version 3.0 was scheduled for November 2022, and version 4.0 was scheduled for November 2023, with continuous evolution.

Compared with WiFi 6, WiFi 7 has improved significantly in terms of user experience, in addition to the 320MHz large bandwidth of 6GHz, MLO (multi-link operation), multi-AP (wireless access point) collaboration, and 4K QAM modulation and demodulation technology. However, the real commercial use of 6GHz requires end-to-end cooperation, and currently there are not many mobile phones and computers that support it.

Currently, only the United States and South Korea can officially certify the 6GHz spectrum of WiFi. China is expected to use 6GHz for the next generation of mobile communication 6G network and will also reserve some resources for WiFi 6GHz. It should be noted that WiFi 7 can be deployed not only in 6GHz, but also in 2.4G and 5GHz, but it does not have the large bandwidth of 320MHz.

At the same time, chips are an important core of WiFi 7. Now Qualcomm, Broadcom, and MediaTek are all providing chips for WiFi 7. With chip devices, they will follow closely, such as AP and other products.

"WiFi 7 solves the pain points of some corporate and industry customers in terms of speed increase, function enhancement and performance improvement." Communications experts said that WiFi 7 will play an important role in large-bandwidth application scenarios, such as high-quality video, AR/VR, virtual live broadcast, cloud gaming, etc., which will have certain competitiveness.

It now appears that operators are also constantly expanding the coverage of 5G. Some scenarios that cannot be reached by optical fiber can be solved by using the mode of hanging WiFi AP nodes under 5G. The combination of 5G and WiFi may be more effective in enabling customers to achieve ubiquitous access in the future.