Don't look now, but the latest upgrade to the Wi-Fi standard, IEEE 802.11be (aka "Wi-Fi 7), is here … almost.
On Wednesday, the No. 2-sized U.S. cable company, Charter Communications, announced that it has partnered with Qualcomm Technologies to deliver Wi-Fi 7 routers to its Spectrum Advanced WiFi customers starting in 2024, when the Wi-Fi standard is set to be fully baked.
Also read: WiFi Gets Its Biggest Upgrade in Decades
Spectrum Wi-Fi users, who can lease their routers for $5 a month, are in for a major speed boost, with Wi-Fi 7 capable of throughputs up to 46 gigabits per second. That's 4.8 times faster than routers built around the current Wi-Fi 6 standard (802.11ax) and 13 times faster than Wi-Fi 5 (802.11ac).
Wi-Fi 7 is already being marketed around a key tech acronym — EHT (aka “extremely high throughput”).
Debuting in 2019, Wi-Fi 6 offered a major speed advantage over Wi-Fi 5. Two years later, the standard was "extended" into Wi-Fi 6E, which took advantage of the Federal Communications Commission’s decision to allocate 1,200 MHz of 6 GHz spectrum for unlicensed use. That immediately tripled the bandwidth available with incumbent 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz spectrum bands.
Our sibling pub, Tom's Guide, published back in February a useful comparison of Wi-Fi 6E and Wi-Fi 7.
Wi-Fi 7 further builds on that, doubling maximum channel bandwidth to 320 MHz.
Wi-Fi 7 also offers an increase in quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM), a technique for encoding radio signals. Wi-Fi 7 ups the 1024-QAM of Wi-Fi 6 to 4096-QAM — comparable to TVs jumping from HD to 4K resolutions.
Wi-Fi 7 also includes a new feature called “multi-link operation” (MLO), which enables the aggregation of multiple radio links in different spectrum bands. This increases throughput and cuts down on network congestion and latency.
“The leading Wi-Fi 7 innovations from Qualcomm Technologies will enable our Advanced Wi-Fi service to continue delivering robust and responsive internet connectivity and ultra-fast Wi-Fi speeds to our customers,” Dave Rodrian, Charter’s group VP of Wi-Fi products, said in a statement. “This next generation of Wi-Fi will support the delivery of new experiences, such as fully immersive, ultra-low latency VR, and aligns with our network evolution plan to enable multi-gig wireless connectivity across our entire footprint.”
