Certification of Wi-Fi 7- the subsequent era in wi-fi networking for house, enterprise, and industrial environments- is predicted by the top of the primary quarter of 2024, in accordance with a submit on the Wi-Fi Alliance web site.
“Wi-Fi Certified 7, based on IEEE 802.11be technology, will be available before the end of Q1 2024,” the Alliance, an business group that units Wi-Fi requirements, in addition to drives adoption and evolution of the expertise, famous in its submit.
“Wi-Fi 7 devices are entering the market today, and Wi-Fi Certified 7 will facilitate worldwide interoperability and bring advanced Wi-Fi performance to the next era of connected devices,” it added.
The group maintained that Wi-Fi 7 will convey cutting-edge capabilities to purposes that require excessive throughput, decrease latency, and larger reliability, purposes that faucet into applied sciences equivalent to augmented, digital, and prolonged actuality, immersive 3D coaching, and ultra-high definition video streaming.
Speed Demon
“Wi-Fi 7 offers dramatically increased speeds over Wi-Fi 6 and 6E,” mentioned Kristen Hanich, an analyst with Parks Associates, a market analysis and consulting firm specializing in client expertise merchandise, in Dallas.
“Wi-Fi 7’s key differentiating feature over 6 and 6E is its support of extremely high throughput, reaching speeds up to 46 Gbps compared to a max of 10 Gbps for Wi-Fi 6E,” she instructed TechNewsWorld.
“This is far beyond what the vast majority of residential subscribers today need, and also far beyond what most residential internet service providers offer today,” she continued.
“A more immediate benefit to users is lower power consumption from client devices such as laptops or phones, but it remains to be seen how much of a difference this makes under real-world conditions,” she added.
Dynamic Band Switching Advantage
One of probably the most anticipated new options of Wi-Fi 7 is multi-link operation (MLO), famous Andrew Spivey, a senior analyst with ABI Research, a worldwide expertise intelligence agency.
“It will help resolve the spectrum congestion challenges that consumers and enterprises are currently facing by vastly improving spectrum efficiency,” he instructed TechNewsWorld. “MLO does this by enabling the aggregating of multiple radio links to form wider channels than would otherwise be necessary.”
“Today, if you connect to a Wi-Fi hotspot, you need to decide which band to connect to — 2.4 GHz, 5 GHz or 6 GHz — and that’s it. For as long as you’re connected, that’s the band that you’re using,” Ross Rubin, the principal analyst with Reticle Research, a client expertise advisory agency in New York City, instructed TechNewsWorld.
“What multi-link operation allows you to do,” he continued, “is connect dynamically to multiple bands.”
Spivey added that one other key advantage of Wi-Fi 7 is that it permits entry to the lately launched 6 GHz band, which successfully doubles the out there spectrum — and due to this fact capability — within the U.S., which may also assist overcome spectrum congestion challenges.
Gaining Market Traction
Rubin defined that in current occasions, the Wi-Fi Alliance has been accelerating its time to standardization over the tempo of the primary few generations of Wi-Fi.
“One reason 6E was adopted so soon after 6 was because the U.S. government approved the 6 GHz band — the main feature of 6E — and the alliance wanted to accommodate that,” he mentioned.
“By contrast,” he added, “Wi-Fi 7 is more in the vein of what we would expect to see in improvements over a previous generation.”
Those earlier generations — Wi-Fi 6 and 6E — have been gaining traction out there since their introductions in 2019 and 2021. According to the Wi-Fi Alliance, greater than half the Wi-Fi-enabled units shipped in 2022 had been 6 or 6E licensed.
“The Alliance expected over 350 million Wi-Fi 6E devices to hit the market that year,” Hanich mentioned. “This is much faster than prior Wi-Fi generations.”
The market’s urge for food for Wi-Fi 6 units isn’t prone to wane. “Yet while Wi-Fi 6 demand will continue, Wi-Fi 7 will see rapid traction, thanks to demand for its many new features, particularly pent-up demand for the additional network capacity that Wi-Fi 7 can offer,” Spivey maintained.
Competing With 6 and 6E
Hanich famous that newer requirements all the time compete with the older ones — on worth if nothing else.
“Wi-Fi 6 and 6E adoption was helped by the Wi-Fi 5 chipset shortage, which made the chips hard to find and expensive when they were found,” she mentioned. “7 won’t have that advantage and will have to compete directly with Wi-Fi 6 and especially 6E.”
“Although 7 does offer dramatically higher bandwidth than Wi-Fi 6E, it is far beyond the needs of most consumers today,” she continued. “There are niches where it will do very well, however — AR/VR applications, enterprise environments where people need to move large quantities of data quickly, and so on.”
There are indicators, nonetheless, that Wi-Fi 6E could not harm Wi-Fi 7 gross sales that a lot.
In a analysis report Spivey wrote in November, he famous anticipation for Wi-Fi 7 has been excessive all through 2023. At the identical time, he continued, few Wi-Fi 6E deployments have been made within the yr thus far, reflecting a extensively held perception that Wi-Fi 6E was merely a steppingstone normal and that its relevance would quickly lower upon the arrival of Wi-Fi 7.
Slow Market Integration
Gaining certification from the Wi-Fi Alliance is only the start of the market journey for Wi-Fi 7.
“The time it takes for a new Wi-Fi standard to be incorporated into the market varies, but it typically takes two to three years for widespread adoption,” Mark N. Vena, president and principal analyst with SmartTech Research, in San Jose, Calif., instructed TechNewsWorld.
He cited a number of elements affecting adoption, together with system availability and value, perceived advantages of the usual, and the way advertising and marketing builds consciousness of the usual.
Hanich agreed that it takes years for the market to embrace a brand new normal. “It depends on how much of a leap forward the technology represents and how in-demand it is,” she mentioned.
“Wi-Fi 6 and 6E had quick uptake compared to prior generations, partially due to the pandemic — ISPs upgraded their routers, and consumers went out and bought new products,” she continued.
“There are already some pre-certification Wi-Fi 7 devices on the market, and premium products are likely to include 7 as soon as certified chips are available,” she added, “but it generally takes longer to trickle out to the rest of the ecosystem.”