Wi-Fi 6 is not yet popular, so why has the latecomer Wi-Fi 7 become a battlefield for giants?

When it comes to Wi-Fi, everyone is familiar with it. With the popularization of smart terminals, Wi-Fi has become one of the mainstream ways for electronic devices to access the Internet. In recent years, the generations of Wi-Fi technology have continued to evolve. Today, Wi-Fi 5 is still mainstream, Wi-Fi is in full swing, and Wi-Fi7 has also quietly arrived. On this stage, what they perform is not like a drama of "I sing and you come on stage", but rather "competing on the same stage".

Although in early 2022, as an upgraded version of Wi-Fi 6, Wi-Fi 6E is clearly at the forefront of technology. However, when Wi-Fi 6E has not been commercialized and Wi-Fi 6 is still at the forefront, in order to seize the next-generation wireless network technology market, Qualcomm, MediaTek, Realtek and other manufacturers have begun to deploy WiFi 7. Today, Wi-Fi 7 has become a competition field for giants.

Technological evolution: Wi-Fi 7 will bring an excellent experience

The first generation of Wi-Fi standard protocol 802.11 was formulated in 1997. After more than 20 years, the 802.11 standard protocol has grown and evolved to the seventh generation 802.11be, which is what we call Wi-Fi 7. It is reported that Wi-Fi 7 introduces 320MHz bandwidth, 4096-QAM, Multi-RU, multi-link operation, enhanced MU-MIMO, multi-AP collaboration and other technologies based on Wi-Fi 6, so that Wi-Fi 7 will provide higher data transmission rate and lower latency compared to Wi-Fi 6.

When developing it, IEEE divided Wi-Fi 7 into two phases, R1 and R2, with a total of four drafts, and is expected to release the official version in mid-2024. Currently, although the first draft has been released, judging from the schedule, Wi-Fi 7 is still a long way from being officially released. Judging from the already released draft 1, Wi-Fi 7 will bring the following changes:

First, it supports the Multi-RU mechanism, which is similar to allocating multiple idle lanes on a highway to a tank, which will further improve spectrum utilization and significantly improve bandwidth and latency. Second, it supports the Multi-Link mechanism, which redefines the technology related to multi-link aggregation, and greatly improves bandwidth, latency, and reliability. Third, it supports more spatial streams, with the maximum number of spatial streams for a single radio frequency as high as 16. In theory, the physical transmission rate is more than doubled compared to Wi-Fi 6.

In addition, Wi-Fi 7 also supports collaborative scheduling between multiple APs, which can coordinate time domain, frequency domain and other resources and interference in the AP of the entire network. It includes features such as collaborative spatial reuse (CoSR), collaborative orthogonal frequency division multiple access (Co-OFDMA), and collaborative beamforming (CoBF), which will greatly improve the utilization of air interface resources.

Based on the above characteristics, Wi-Fi 7 can help industrial manufacturing achieve flexible production of all-wireless products, help mines achieve unmanned mining, and realize automatic inspection by robots. At the same time, with the characteristics of high bandwidth and low latency, Wi-Fi 7 will also greatly promote the rapid development of scene applications such as the metaverse and edge computing.

Even though the global Wi-Fi 7 technical specifications have not yet been finalized, driven by new concepts and applications such as the metaverse, autonomous driving, and AIOT, the industry is naturally generally optimistic about the subsequent market development.

Giants rush to the beachhead, launching a new round of competition

The competition for Wi-Fi 6 is in the ascendant, and Wi-Fi 7 has ushered in a new competition among giants. Since 2022, MediaTek, Broadcom, and Qualcomm have successively released Wi-Fi 7 main control chips or related technologies and solutions. Among them, MediaTek demonstrated its Wi-Fi 7 live in January this year. It is reported that MediaTek Wi-Fi 7 can transmit 2.4 times faster than Wi-Fi 6 through 320MHz channels and 4K quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) technology, and the peak speed can reach 30Gbps.

At the same time, MediaTek Wi-Fi 7 demonstrates Multi-Link Operation (MLO) technology, which aggregates multiple channels on different frequency bands at the same time. Even if the frequency bands are interfered or congested, data can still be transmitted seamlessly, thus achieving faster and more reliable network connections. In addition, MediaTek Wi-Fi 7 has a Multi-User Resource Unit (MRU) function to reduce and avoid signal interference, meeting the needs of multiple people at the same time and high-speed connection.

In April 2022, Broadcom launched the WiFi 7 SoC, which uses a quad-core Armv8 processor that can provide 24 DMIPS performance, and released the Wi-Fi 7 ecosystem product portfolio, including multiple models for consumer and enterprise products, as well as for mobile devices. It is reported that Broadcom is providing Wi-Fi 7 samples to customers.

Qualcomm released the world's first commercial Wi-Fi 7 chip solution, FastConnect 7800, which supports high-frequency multi-connection concurrent technology, 4K QAM modulation technology, and three major frequency bands: 2.4GHz, 5GHz, and 6GHz. The peak transmission speed can reach 5.8Gbps, the peak downlink speed is as high as 5.8Gbps, and it supports a latency of less than 2ms.

In addition, recently, ZTE 5G launched the MC888 Flagship, a 5G CPE product based on the Wi-Fi 7 standard, at the MWC conference. This product integrates Wi-Fi 7 high concurrency technology and 5G high speed, with a peak network download rate of up to 10Gbps. Coincidentally, H3C also released an enterprise-level intelligent native Wi-Fi 7 AP that supports iRadio, iStation, iEdge and iHeal technologies. It is reported that the channel utilization rate is increased by 56%, the terminal access efficiency is increased by 33%, the service transmission channel is increased by 220%, and the network operation and maintenance time is shortened by 30%.

The road ahead is bumpy. When will it be ready for commercial use?

According to the 2018-2024 China Network Wireless Market Size Forecast released by IDC China, the Wi-Fi 6 standard was released in 2019, and the market was in a wait-and-see period in the same year, and Wi-Fi 5 was still not mainstream in the market. In 2020, the Wi-Fi 6 market showed explosive growth, but Wi-Fi 5 still accounted for more than half. In 2021, Wi-Fi 6 surpassed Wi-Fi 5 for the first time, and Wi-Fi 5 still occupied a certain market share.

We can see that it took Wi-Fi 6 two years from the release of the standard in 2019 to surpass Wi-Fi 5 for the first time in 2021. Many people believe that Wi-Fi 7 will also follow this pattern, and the standard is expected to be released in 2024 and reach large-scale commercial use around 2026. In other words, Wi-Fi 6 still has at least four years to occupy the mainstream position in the market.

Source: IDC

In addition, Wi-Fi 7 has a large bandwidth of at least 30Gbps, mainly because it uses the 6GHz band under the Wi-Fi 6E standard. This new band brings 1200MHz of spectrum bandwidth. Currently, there is almost no interference in the 6GHz band. However, China has not yet given a clear policy on the 6GHz band. It has not yet been finalized whether 6425-7125MHz will be granted to 5/6G mobile communications or Wi-Fi.

In addition, in terms of terminals, although Wi-Fi 7 is backward compatible with terminals such as Wi-Fi 6/5/4, it can only unleash its full potential if the terminals support Wi-Fi 7. Perhaps, the Wi-Fi 7 APs currently on the market cannot take advantage of the improvements in bandwidth, latency, capacity, etc. brought by the Wi-Fi 7 standard. The commercialization of Wi-Fi 7 is difficult.

Final Thoughts

From Wi-Fi 5 to Wi-Fi 6, and then to Wi-Fi 7, Wi-Fi technology standards are constantly evolving, and corresponding chips, solutions, and hardware terminals will inevitably follow. In addition, the development of AIoT requires Wi-Fi to have higher transmission speeds and larger transmission bandwidths. Standing at the node leading to Wi-Fi 7, we have reason to believe that with the continuous participation and competition of giants, WiFi 7 is expected to play a greater role in the future.