Wi-Fi 7: What is it and when can you expect it to arrive?

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Wi-Fi 7 is expected to have higher data rates and lower latency than Wi-Fi 6

Less than a month ago, the Wi-Fi Alliance announced the certification of Wi-Fi 6E (Wi-Fi 6 Extended), which means that Wi-Fi can utilize the 6GHz band for unlicensed Wi-Fi operation. But while the industry is celebrating the first additional spectrum received by Wi-Fi in 20 years, the next generation of wireless technology is already on the horizon, promising higher data rates and lower latency.

Wi-Fi 7 (or 802.11be) will also use multi-band/multi-channel aggregation and operation and provide higher spectral and power efficiency, better interference mitigation, higher capacity density and higher cost efficiency compared to Wi-Fi 6. The seventh generation of Wi-Fi is also known as Wi-Fi Extreme Throughput because it is expected to be able to support up to 30Gbps throughput, about three times that of Wi-fi 6.

The Wi-Fi 7 standard has many proposed features, but direct enhancements to Wi-Fi 6 include support for 320MHz transmission (twice the 160MHz in 802.11ax), use of higher modulation orders, optional support for 4096-QAM (up from 1024-QAM in 802.11ax), and allocation of multiple resource units (e.g., OFMDA tone groups).

Provided by Intel Corporation

The last feature mentioned above - the allocation of multiple resource units - will improve spectrum utilization, making Wi-Fi 7 an ideal choice for the enterprise space as they continue their digital transformation and add AR/VR, IoT and IIoT applications to their workflows. In addition, Wi-Fi 7 has the potential to improve support for applications that require deterministic latency, high reliability and quality of service (QoS).

In addition, Wi-Fi 7 will be optimized for video applications, which is not only valuable in the enterprise space, but also within the home to meet use cases such as gaming, streaming media, and other smart home devices and services.

And the focus on video is critical because it is expected to soon become the mainstream traffic type. In fact, Cisco's Visual Networking Index shows that by 2022, global IP video traffic will account for 82% of all IP traffic, both enterprise and consumer.

Provided by Intel Corporation

The IEEE plans to release the 802.11ba amendment sometime in 2024, in conjunction with commercial deployments. Then, just like Wi-Fi 6 and 6E, the Wi-Fi Alliance will release its Wi-Fi 7 certification program to ensure interoperability and security standards.