Alliance Releases Wi-Fi 7

The Wi-Fi Alliance released a new version of its wireless technology Monday, boasting new features designed to boost performance and improve connectivity across a variety of environments.

New features in Wi-Fi Certified 7 include:

• 320 MHz channels in countries, like the United States, that make the 6GHz band available to Wi-Fi, which facilitates multi-gigabit device speeds and high throughput;
• Multi-Link Operation (MLO), which allows devices to transmit and receive data simultaneously over multiple links for increased throughput, reduced latency, and improved reliability;
• 4K Quadrature Amplitude Modulation for higher transmission rates; and
• 512 Compressed block-ack to enhance spectrum efficiency.

Alliance President and CEO Kevin Robertson said in a statement that the introduction of Wi-Fi Certified 7 marks the emergence of the latest generation of Wi-Fi and will be an accelerant to mass adoption of Wi-Fi 7.

“This certification underscores our relentless commitment to delivering cutting-edge technology that redefines the way users experience Wi-Fi, providing faster speeds, improved efficiency, and increased reliability, which expand the horizons of what is possible through Wi-Fi,” he added.

The Alliance predicts that Wi-Fi 7 will be rapidly adopted across a broad ecosystem, with more than 233 million devices entering the market in 2024, growing to 2.1 billion devices by 2028.

In terms of U.S. dollars, IDC is forecasting the wireless LAN market to reach $23 billion by 2027, with a 3% compound annual growth over the next five years.

Businesses and consumers are expected to to start to deploy Wi-Fi 7 later this year with quite a significant increase by 2025 and beyond.

From a technology standpoint, Wi-Fi 7 is a big deal because it achieves faster throughput through several key technologies.

The use of advanced modulation schemes, such as 4K-QAM, allows for higher data rates per transmission. Multi-User Multiple Input Multiple Output technology enables simultaneous data transmission to multiple devices, enhancing overall network efficiency.The introduction of Basic Service Set Coloring reduces interference in crowded environments, further optimizing throughput.

MLO is a feature that excites technologists because it changes the operational characteristics of Wi-Fi. Multi-link allows a device to connect to more than one radio, for example, the 2.4GHz radio and the 5GHz radio on one access point, and send data across those channels simultaneously. That’s a paradigm change, experts say.

That sort of functionality is very complex. It might take a couple of years for it to correctly work in enterprise and production environments.

The Alliance also noted that it expects smartphones, PCs, tablets, and access points to be the earliest adopters of Wi-Fi 7, and customer premises equipment (CPE) and augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR) equipment will continue to gain early market traction.

New generative AI applications that require high throughput will benefit from Wi-Fi 7’s fast speeds.

The biggest new feature related to security is with Multi-Link Operation, where a single, high-level MAC address is used for the encryption keys. This is more secure because instead of three keys being used one key for each of the possible radio bands is used and the devices only need to build one set of keys.

Experts don’t advise enterprises to rush into Wi-Fi 7 as it will take about 36 months to see total realization from Wi-Fi 7.