The future of wireless networking is looking bright with the upcoming release of Wi-Fi 7. This latest iteration in the Wi-Fi series boasts impressive advancements, including significant bandwidth and latency improvements, making it nearly five times faster than Wi-Fi 6. The Wi-Fi Alliance has planned several other notable improvements, including the utilization of the 6 GHz band, lower latency, and increased reliability.
Wi-Fi 7 is based on the draft 802.11be standard published in May 2021 and is currently in development. Its potential for lightning-fast speeds is one of its most significant features, capable of supporting bandwidth up to 46 gigabits per second (Gbps) per access point, which is nearly five times faster than the maximum speed of Wi-Fi 6.
In addition to its theoretical potential for lightning-fast speeds, Wi-Fi 7 promises to provide better connectivity, reduced latency, and increased reliability, offering a significant upgrade to Wi-Fi 6 and previous iterations of the Wi-Fi standard. Wi-Fi 7 is also designed to address the specific needs of modern device-rich organizations and households, with optimizations aimed at improving performance.
The upcoming standard promises to deliver lower latencies and higher reliabilities for time-sensitive networking (TSN), which is critical for cloud computing and cloud gaming.
Achieving this goal is also crucial for replacing wired Ethernet connections. The objective of Wi-Fi 7 is to offer consistent single-digit millisecond latency across the entire network for all connected devices, ensuring that every device in the network benefits from the low latency performance of Wi-Fi 7.
While still in development, the proposed Wi-Fi 7 specification holds great promise for the future of wireless networking and represents a significant step forward for the industry. We can expect the first Wi-Fi 7 routers and devices to become available in mid-2023, and with its blazing-fast speeds and significantly reduced latency, Wi-Fi 7 has the potential to revolutionize wireless networking.