What is Wi-Fi 7 (Wi-Fi 802.11be)? What Are the New Features of Wi-Fi 7?

Wireless technology has upgraded at a rapid speed over the past few years. Hardly a few years after the Wi-Fi 6 release, the Wi-Fi association is now setting up to release the latest wireless standard known as Wi-Fi 7. This advancement will not only provide increased speed, but also greatly enhance the responsiveness for cutting-edge future technologies and immersive customer experiences. 

Wi-Fi 7 is the next generation of Wi-Fi technology and is still developing. But there are some new features that we can expect from Wi-Fi 7, and today we’re going to talk about them and how Wi-Fi 7 is better than Wi-Fi 6/6E.

What is Wi-Fi 7 (Wi-Fi 802.11be)?

The Wi-Fi Alliance, the body that oversees the design and standards of this wireless technology, has produced a new standard for wireless network communication called Wi-Fi 7, also referred to by its technical name, 802.11be.

Wi-Fi 7 is a new wireless networking standard that will replace Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax) and Wi-Fi 6E (802.11ax), which have been made become available in 2019 and 2020, respectively. 

Therefore, not too long ago, when Wi-Fi 6 was launched, it was not a significant improvement; instead, it delivered an incremental increase in speed and latency. 

This was the case because Wi-Fi 6 was a minor upgrade. Wi-Fi Alliance provided compatibility for the 6GHz spectrum for the first time with Wi-Fi 6E. However, the new frequency was unused. Thus it could have functioned to its full potential and needed to be utilized to its maximum capacity. The release of Wi-Fi 7 brings about a shift in all aspects.

What Are the New Features of Wi-Fi 7?

The next iteration of Wi-Fi will have a multitude of enhancements that will usher in all-new levels of reactivity and consistency. Wi-Fi technology has been helping to keep the globe linked for more than 20 years by catering to the ever-increasing requirements of an ever-expanding user base. Intel has been a contributor to this ever-evolving endeavor throughout the process.

The new features of Wi-Fi 7 will expand upon the innovations of Wi-Fi 6 and Wi-Fi 6E to not only enable higher speeds but also drastically increase responsiveness and dependability for future applications that require highly consistent and precise results.

Here are the new features of Wi-Fi 7: 

Broadening the Bandwidth of Individual Channels from 160 MHz to 320 MHz

The 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz frequency ranges are both different unlicensed strands crowded and restricted in their availability. Existing Wi-Fi networks will invariably experience inferior quality of service when used to operate innovative applications such as virtual reality and augmented reality (quality of service). Wi-Fi 7 will support the 6 GHz frequency range and extend new frequency modes to reach a maximum speed of 30 Gbps.

Improved Latency

Even though legacy Wi-Fi gives users access to several different wireless bands, most devices only use a single bar for transmissions; they only shift to another round if the surrounding conditions change. 

Wi-Fi 7 devices can connect concurrently on two bands thanks to MLO or Multi-Link Operation. Aggregation makes it possible to get higher speeds, thanks to this. Both bands may be used simultaneously to communicate redundant or unique data to provide increased dependability with extremely low and accurate latency.

Multi-RU

Because each user in Wi-Fi 6 may only broadcast or receive frames on the RUs allotted, this significantly reduces the flexibility in scheduling spectrum resources. Wi-Fi 7 describes a system that allows numerous RUs to be assigned to a single user. 

This alleviated the issue and further increased the spectrum’s overall efficiency. The standard specifications include various constraints on the RU combination to maintain a healthy balance between the design complexity and spectrum use. 

Small RUs can only be mixed with other small RUs, but big RUs may only be coupled with other large RUs. Both small and big RUs can be united into a single RU.

4K QAM

The highest-order modulation that Wi-Fi 6 can handle is called 1024-QAM, enabling each modulation symbol to convey as many as 10 bits of information. 

Wi-Fi 7 implements 4096-QAM, which enables every modulation signal to hold 12 bits, making the rate increase even more possible. Comparing 4096-QAM in Wi-Fi 7 to 1024-QAM in Wi-Fi 6, which uses the same coding, the latter can achieve a 20% improvement in data transfer rate.