After Wi-Fi 6 and Wi-Fi 6E, next in line is Wi-Fi 7: The new wireless internet standard, also known as IEEE 802.11be, has now been officially certified and launched, which means it’s about to start showing up in consumer gadgets.
Wi-Fi standards are the responsibility of the Wi-Fi Alliance, an industry body that works in partnership with hundreds of technology companies—including Apple, Samsung, Intel, and Sony—to drive forward and regulate Wi-Fi development.
Now that certification has been approved, you can start thinking about taking advantage of Wi-Fi 7 and upgrading to hardware that supports it. It brings with it a number of key improvements, which should mean faster, more reliable Wi-Fi at home.
The Wi-Fi 7 difference
Like earlier Wi-Fi upgrades, Wi-Fi 7 brings with it more bandwidth. The analogy usually deployed here is cars traveling along a highway: More bandwidth means more lanes in which the cars can travel. Even if the data packets (the cars) aren’t actually traveling faster, there’s more room for them to move at once, which should mean less interference and congestion, and faster speeds around your Wi-Fi network as a result.
With the latest Wi-Fi routers, you have three frequency bands: 2.4GHz, 5GHz, and 6GHz, which are a little bit like different types of road (to keep the transport analogy). Data moves more slowly on the 2.4GHz band, but can travel further distances; whereas on the 5GHz and 6GHz bands, data moves faster over a reduced range.
Wi-Fi 7 doesn’t affect these bands, but it does affect the channels they’re made up of. Wi-Fi 7 doubles the bandwidth of the channels, up to 320MHz, but only on the 6GHz band (there isn’t the ‘room’ for more lanes to be built on the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands).
From a practical standpoint, this benefits environments with many devices vying for bandwidth. So if you have tons of smart devices, streaming boxes, and other data-hungry gadgets vying for bandwidth,…
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