Telecoms Planning WiFi 7 upgrade to meet the demand

Slow internet is not only welcome in your spare time, it is also a problem in the home office caused by the pandemic. Of course, manufacturers are constantly working on new solutions and Wi-Fi 7 should be a big step forward. WiFi is ubiquitous these days and it just keeps getting better and faster. The current standard is called Wi-Fi 6 and is now supported by most new hardware models. There is already an official successor called Wi-Fi 6E, which offers support for the 6 GHz frequency band.

Up to 40Gb speed

But on paper and in initial tests, the industry has long progressed. Because the industry is currently working on Wi-Fi 7, also known as IEEE 802.11be. Like its predecessors, Wi-Fi 7 has access to the 2.4 GHz, 5 GHz, and 6 GHz spectrum. However, the latest WLAN standard would be about 2.4 times faster than Wi-Fi 6.

This is achieved on the one hand with a channel expansion up to 320 MHz and on the other hand with the support of 4K quadrature-amplitude modulation (QAM) . Infographic Internet network expansion in Germany: not a nice broadband country Of course the end customer first and foremost wants to know how fast the WLAN of the future will be: Wi-Fi 6 theoretically supports up to 9.6 Gbit/s, according to the Wi-Fi Alliance the following will be provide full version number “minimum” 30 GBit/s, possibly even up to 40 GBit/s.

if Ars Technica reported, the semiconductor manufacturer MediaTek has now performed a first successful demo of Wi-Fi 7, which was shown to “key customers and employees of the industry”. This means that Wi-Fi 7 can achieve the same theoretical speed as USB4. MediaTek executive Alan Hsu sounded correspondingly euphoric: “With the introduction of Wi-Fi 7, Wi-Fi will be a true cable/Ethernet replacement for very high bandwidth applications for the first time.” Currently, the specifications for Wi-Fi 7 are still in the design phase and are expected to be certified by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in 2024. However, MediaTek still thinks that the first consumer products will hit the market as early as 2023.