Still neither the industry nor most of the internet providers in the world have adopted Wi-Fi 6 and Wi-Fi 7 is already knocking on the door in order to mark the new generations of Wi-Fi that will take connectivity to the next level. The next generation of the Wi-Fi standard is Wi-Fi 7 and Intel presents it as a must-have.
When developing an industry standard, finding a mutually acceptable solution is essential. First, the Wi-Fi Alliance has taken a new approach to naming. This provides users with easier-to-understand terms for the Wi-Fi technology supported by the devices and for connecting them to a Wi-Fi network.
For nearly two decades, Wi-Fi users have had to grapple with cumbersome technical naming conventions to determine whether their devices supported the latest versions of Wi-Fi. Now, the naming system has been simplified in that Wi-Fi generations are numbered according to the most significant level of improvement.
This enables businesses and service providers to support new and emerging applications on the same wireless local area network (WLAN) infrastructure while providing a higher level of service than older applications.
5G is a cellular service and Wi-Fi 7 is a short-range wireless access technology. The new Wi-Fi 7 shares the characteristics of 5G, including improved performance.
With Wi-Fi 6, Wi-Fi Alliance introduced better security with WPA3, the latest and greatest in Wi-Fi security. And a much bigger improvement in latency, up to 75% improvement in latency. Wi-Fi 6 is, therefore, a technology that, by itself, brings significant improvements over previous generations.
Wi-Fi 6 provides four times greater scalability with new technologies around OFDMA and better interference management, in particular, we use more capacity to do more scheduled access and therefore better QoS.
With Wi-Fi 7 there will be more capacity and support up to 7 gigahertz and also for the lower bands where the user can have some IoT (Internet of Things) applications such as sensors that require less bandwidth. So this is a completely different type of use for the new Wi-Fi use.
With the improvement in latency, it will make the network more deterministic, plus the more latency you have, the more predictable the network will be and that is really important for many industrial applications.
The development of Wi-Fi 7 is up and running and may take another five years, so at least 2024 will not see any commercial product next year with Wi-Fi 7, but it is something to keep in mind to see what the outlook is and what kind of improvements we should expect.
Wi-Fi 7 features and capabilities are still in development as part of the standardization, IEEE, as part of the 802.11b project. But it's important to start getting feedback and make sure users and use cases are being tracked.
The other capacity that is being defined refers to the 320 megahertz channels, so the channel size for the Wi-Fi 7 standard has practically doubled.
In theory, it is intended to double the capacity compared to what we can obtain today with 160 megahertz channels and all the functions that are also being considered, and that are very interesting, are what is called multilink operation.
So Wi-Fi 7 will have a theoretical physical performance almost five times higher than Wi-Fi 6. But of course these are things you have access points and clients for, which have the maximum number of streams and operate on those 320 megahertz channels, which also uses the highest modulation, so that's theoretical.
So if we consider a practical scenario where we have access points and clients, and where clients generally assume two spatial streams, and with different modulations, 256 and 1K or 4K, we still get multi-gigabit bitrates when using channels of 320 megahertz that should be widely available in two space streams.