Written by Andrew Wooden
The latest iteration of wifi technology – Wi-Fi 7 – will enable applications that are ‘impractical or impossible with other wired and wireless technologies’ claims The Wireless Broadband Alliance.
The WBA says Wi-Fi 7 will provide twice the bandwidth and three times the speed of Wi-Fi 6, and as such will allow an array of new consumer, enterprise, Industry 4.0, medical, smart city applications, as part of a report called ‘Get Ready for Wi-Fi 7: Applying New Capabilities to the Key Use Cases.’
Wi-Fi 7 is based on the IEEE 802.11be (Extreme High Throughput) and in terms of speed and bandwidth, the report explains it supports channel widths up to 320 MHz, while Wi-Fi 5 and Wi-Fi 6 are limited to 160 MHz. It also supports 4k QAM, which is an upgraded version of prior standards.
The subsequent three-fold speed increase is ‘critical for enabling whole-home multi-Gigabit Wi-Fi service,’ we’re told.
Wi-Fi 7 devices can also use multi-link operation (MLO) in the 2.4 GHz, 5 GHz, and 6 GHz bands to increase throughput by aggregating multiple links or to quickly move critical applications to the optimal band, all of which is pitched as useful for ‘latency-sensitive’ applications such as immersive XR/AR/VR, online gaming and other things that require high throughput, low latency, minimal jitter, and high reliability.
