Everything you need about Wi-Fi 7

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Networking devices with Wi-Fi 6 becoming more widely available and affordable Tech companies are already planning to incorporate Wi-Fi 7 into their products and services.

This new standard — currently known as  802.11be — focuses on Extremely High-Throughput (EHT) that can aid real-time apps with high data speeds. The IEEE working group said it’ll help services in virtual reality, augmented reality, gaming, and remote working.

In its current form, here’s how Wi-Fi 7 will compare to Wi-Fi 6 (and even Wi-Fi 6E).

For the uninitiated, Wi-Fi 6 is the standard current standard present in many routers that support 9.6Gbps data transfer speeds — as compared to 3.5Gbps of Wi-Fi 5 — and higher throughput. It’s important to note that Wi-Fi standards use Gigabits per second as a measure, vs. GigaBytes per second (GBps). So it’ll take 8 seconds for you to download a 1GB file at 1Gbps speed.

Wi-Fi 6E is largely built on Wi-Fi 6 but it also includes support for 6 GHz spectrum. It also has high-bandwidth channels and supports multiple devices on one high-speed network. It is available here.

Keep in mind that the standard is in the draft stage, and the final specifications might be different when they’re published.

Wi-Fi 6 vs. Wi-Fi 7

Don’t worry if you don’t immediately grasp every spec below. I’ll explain them all in a second.

  • Speed of data transfer 9.6Gbps vs. 46Gbps (approx.)
  • Channel bandwidth: 160MHz vs. 320MHz
  • Number of full-bandwidth channels 7 vs. 6
  • Multi-user MIMO spatial streams: 8 vs. 16
  • Data transmission 1024-QAM vs. 4096-QAM
Channel distribution in different versions of Wi-Fi (Credit: Intel)