The Wi-Fi industry body Wireless Broadband Alliance (WBA) has released a report on Wi-Fi 7, mentioning that with wider channels and 4K QAM (quadrature amplitude modulation) capabilities, Wi-Fi 7 delivers speeds over three times faster than Wi-Fi 6 - critical for enabling whole-home multi-gigabit Wi-Fi service.
The report [pdf] led by WBA members Broadcom, CableLabs, Cisco, and Intel, explores Wi-Fi 7’s impact across sectors including consumer, enterprise, Industry 4.0, medical, and smart cities.
According to it, based on the IEEE 802.11be (Extreme High Throughput) standard, Wi-Fi 7 supports channel widths up to 320 MHz.
Wi-Fi 5 and Wi-Fi 6 are limited to 160 MHz.
Founded in 2003, WBA is a Singapore-based global wireless ecosystem consortium.
WBA’s president and CEO, Tiago Rodrigues, said Wi-Fi 7 capabilities will help bridge the digital divide and enable new use cases across consumer, business, education, government, medical, industrial, hospitality, public venues and transportation.
Trials open to industry players
The WBA is collaborating with its members to conduct field trials in real-life Wi-Fi 7 networks.
According to WBA, the trials are open to industry players and are a crucial platform for mobile device and AP vendors, operators, and service providers to collectively test Wi-Fi 7 capabilities.
Participants will gain hands-on, real-world insights into deploying Wi-Fi 7 across operator, residential, and enterprise networks.
WBA said Wi-Fi 7 devices can use multi-link operation (MLO) in the 2.4 GHz, 5 GHz, and 6 GHz bands to increase throughput by aggregating multiple links or to quickly move critical applications to the optimal band using seamless switching between links.
This allows devices to avoid interference and access Wi-Fi channels without delaying critical traffic, it added.
Cisco’s wireless CTO, Matt MacPherson, said the Wi-Fi 7 standard will unlock the next generation of wireless use cases – AR/VR, autonomous and intelligent vehicles, and streaming 4K video.
