Today, a fairly important part of Internet customers have a router with the 802.11ac standard that corresponds to Wi-Fi 5. However, things have changed a lot in the last year, and perhaps you are planning to move on to the 802.11.ax standard or also known as Wi-Fi 6. Currently finding a router that supports this technology at a good price is already easy to achieve, the improvements in available bandwidth, in global optimization of the WiFi network and lower latency are important. Very soon, the new equipment with Wi-Fi 6E with superior features and with the inclusion of the 6 GHz band will begin to be marketed. On the other hand, WiFi 7 is closer than you think, and in this tutorial we are going to know all its characteristics and the maximum speed of the new standard.
New 802.11be or WiFi 7 standard
Currently when we buy a router, an access point, a wireless card and more they work without problems. This happens regardless of whether we have network equipment from different manufacturers. The reason we don’t have compatibility issues is because there is a body that creates a standard and then the manufacturers apply it.
The IEEE comes from the acronym in English Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, which translated into Spanish means Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers . We are dealing with a non-profit association dedicated to standardization and development in technical areas.
In the case of wireless networks, we have the 802.11 standard, which in different standards have been gaining speed and adding frequency bands to work. As for WiFi 7, it takes time to reach a consensus on standards that will be implemented by all manufacturers. In fact, it takes several years to develop and standardize a new standard until it is approved. Today’s protagonist is WiFi 7, which corresponds to the 802.11be standard and which has been working on since 2019.
What is expected of the new WiFi 7 standard
This 802.11be standard currently has a draft that describes the technical implementation necessary to meet the objectives that were set. Thus, in the field of companies, it is expected that it will benefit IoT and IIoT applications, also industrial automation, surveillance and remote control. Additionally, it could be used for future virtual reality, augmented reality, and other video-based applications that require high bandwidth, lowest possible latency, and highest connection reliability.
As for home users, we could also benefit from WiFi 7 in online gaming thanks to its lower latency. But that’s not all, we also have smart home services and, in addition, applications for virtual reality and augmented reality.
Regarding the expectations that we can expect from this new 802.11be standard are, basically, a higher real transfer rate and lower latency. We will also have greater spectrum efficiency and better energy efficiency, something that WiFi 6 already has thanks to OFDMA and TWT (Target Wake Time). Another aspect that we will also have is that we will have a better mitigation of interference thanks to the BSS Coloring that WiFi 6 already has, and we can have many more devices connected simultaneously without the WiFi network becoming slow.
802.11be or WiFi 7 standard technologies
The EHT Preamble and Universal Signal Field (U-SIG) packet format will provide us with forward compatibility for future changes in frame formats and transmission timing. In addition, it will facilitate the support for multiple PHY frame formats within the same wireless network.
In WiFi 7 we will have a maximum channel width of up to 320 MHz . Thus, after doubling the maximum channel size with respect to Wi-Fi 6 (in the 5GHz and 6GHz band, the maximum channel width is 160MHz) we will be able to double the real performance of the connection. In this case it allows channels of 160 + 160 MHz, also 240 + 80 MHz and 160 + 80MHz to combine non-adjacent spectrum blocks. This means that it is not necessary for these to be contiguous, which will be useful to add channels with little use distributed throughout the frequency band, either 5GHz or the new 6GHz band that is available from the WiFi standard. 6E.
The 16 MU-MIMO antennas compared to the 8 that Wi-Fi 6 has at most, can double the performance in some scenarios. Also more antennas not only mean higher speed, but we will also have better penetration of the Wi-Fi signal. Thus, by having a signal with less noise in points close to the router, we could modulate to 4096-QAM , which translates into a significant increase in real speed. We must remember that the WiFi 6 standard allows up to 1024QAM in all frequency bands.
An OFDMA improved compared to the one introduced in the WiFi 6 will increase the efficiency of the spectrum and reduce the latency. In this way, the experience and support of the most demanding users will be improved. This will be achieved by increasing the flexibility of OFDMAS by allowing the allocation of resource units to a single WiFi station. Multi-Access Point Coordination in which, thanks to the coordination between neighboring access points, it is possible to improve the use of resources, spectrum, reliability, performance and latency. Coordination can include OFDMA, SR, TDMA, BF, and joint processing.
With Multi-link operation MLO, the devices can transmit and / or receive at the same time through different frequency bands and channels, with separation of data and control planes, in this way, thanks to the parallel links, the performance of the device, lowers its latency and also improves its reliability. Also those data streams can be assigned to specific links depending on the program or device.
Maximum speed comparison between the WiFi 7 and WiFi 6 standard
Some may wonder if we need these speeds that Wi-Fi 7 is going to provide us. The answer is yes, since every time we demand greater bandwidth to watch our streaming content at a higher resolution, and we also have more devices connected to the wireless network. In addition, it is necessary to improve latency and for various activities such as gaming, which will be highly appreciated in order not to suffer LAG, in addition to video calls or VoIP calls.
In the following table you can see the evolution of the WiFi network from the WiFi 4 standard to the latest draft of WiFi 7, which is now officially available.
Thanks to Wi-Fi 6 we can achieve data speeds of 9.6 Gbps , as long as we use a router with 8 antennas and using a channel width of 160MHz channel width. Currently the maximum speed of the 5GHz band is 4.8Gbps because there is no WiFi router or access point that has more than 4 spatial streams.
On the other hand, with WiFi 7 , the maximum data rate is 46 Gbps on a 320 MHz channel at 6 GHz and a 160 MHz channel at 5 GHz, with 4096-QAM and 16 spatial streams. The doubling of the spatial flows and the bandwidths of the channels result in an increase of 4.8 times in performance of WiFi 7 compared to Wi-Fi 6. On the other hand, the graph provided by Intel that you have below shows how it increases the data rate of Wi-Fi 7 thanks to a combination of wider channels, more QAM and more spatial streams.
In Wi-Fi 7, thanks to moving to 4096-QAM, the data speed has been improved, especially we will notice it in places close to the WiFi access point or router. However, the greatest performance of this future generation of Wi-Fi, which is already quite close, comes from doubling the channel size to 320MHz and increasing the number of spatial streams.
When will we see the new WiFi 7 standard?
The reality is that this new 802.11be standard that will introduce numerous improvements is closer than it seems. Here’s a timeline with the WiFi 7 forecasts:
It is expected that if everything follows the established plan, we could have the 802.11be standard approved by 2024. Then, not long after, the main manufacturers will launch their routers and other network equipment. Obviously, at the beginning like any novelty, they will be very expensive equipment but with the passage of time they will be more affordable for everyone. The same happened with Wi-Fi 6, and now we already have good quality equipment available in different price ranges.
In summary, WiFi 7 will bring us speeds of up to 46 Gbps theoretical, a channel size of up to 320 MHz and lower latency that gamers will greatly appreciate.