When it comes to Wi-Fi, everyone is no stranger. Since the popularization of smart terminals, Wi-Fi has become one of the mainstream ways for electronic devices to access the network. In recent years, Wi-Fi technology has evolved from generation to generation.
Today, Wi-Fi 5 is still mainstream, Wi-Fi is in the limelight, so mid-heaven, and Wi-Fi 7 is also quietly coming. On this stage, they staged not like the big drama of "we sing you on the stage", but like "competing on the same stage".
Although in early 2022, as an upgraded version of Wi-Fi 6, Wi-Fi 6E is clearly already at the forefront of technology. However, just when Wi-Fi 6E is not commercial, and even Wi-Fi 6 is still on the cusp, in order to seize the next generation of wireless network technology market, Qualcomm, MediaTek, Realtek and other manufacturers have begun to lay out WiFi 7. Today, Wi-Fi 7 has become a competition for giants.
The road is bumpy, when will it be commercialized?
According to the 2018-2024 China network wireless market size forecast released by IDC China, the Wi-Fi 6 standard was released in 2019, and the market was in a wait-and-see period in the same year, and Wi-Fi 5 was still not mainstream in the market. In 2020, the Wi-Fi 6 market showed explosive growth, but Wi-Fi 5 still accounted for more than half. In 2021, Wi-Fi 6 surpassed Wi-Fi 5 for the first time, and Wi-Fi 5 still accounts for a certain market share.
We can see that wi-Fi 6 took 2 years from the release of the standard in 2019 to surpass Wi-Fi 5 for the first time in 2021. Many believe that Wi-Fi 7 will also follow this law, and it is expected to release standards in 2024 and reach large-scale commercial use around 2026. In other words, Wi-Fi 6 has at least 4 years to dominate the market.
In addition, Wi-Fi 7 has a huge bandwidth capability of at least 30 Gbps, mainly because of the use of the 6GHz band under the Wi-Fi 6E standard, this new band brings 1200MHz of spectral bandwidth, and at present, the 6GHz band has almost no interference. However, China has not yet given a clear policy for the 6GHz band, and the 6425-7125MHz grant of 5/6G mobile communications or Wi-Fi has not yet been finalized.
In addition, in terms of terminals, although Wi-Fi 7 is backward compatible with terminals such as Wi-Fi 6/5/4, only terminals that support Wi-Fi 7 can unlock their full potential. Perhaps, the Wi-Fi 7 APs listed at this stage cannot take advantage of the bandwidth, latency, capacity and other aspects of the Wi-Fi 7 standard. Commercial Wi-Fi 7 is struggling.
As technology evolves, Wi-Fi 7 will deliver a great experience
In 1997, the first generation of Wi-Fi standard protocol 802.11 was developed. After more than 20 years, the 802.11 standard protocol has grown and evolved to the seventh generation of 802.11be, which is what we call Wi-Fi7.
It is reported that Wi-Fi7 is based on Wi-Fi 6 to introduce 320MHz bandwidth, 4096-QAM, Multi-RU, multi-link operation, enhanced MU-MIMO, multi-AP collaboration and other technologies, so that Wi-Fi 7 will provide higher data transmission rates and lower latency compared to Wi-Fi 6.
At the time of its formulation, the IEEE divided Wi-Fi 7 into two phases, R1 and R2, with a total of 4 drafts, and an official version is expected to be released in mid-2024. At present, although the first draft has been released, from the timetable point of view, Wi-Fi 7 is still far from the official release. Judging from the already released Draft 1, Wi-Fi 7 will bring the following changes:
First, the support for the Multi-RU mechanism, similar to allocating multiple idle lanes to a tank on a highway, will further improve the spectrum utilization and have a large increase in bandwidth and delay.
Secondly, the multi-link mechanism supports Multi-Link, redefining the technology related to multilink aggregation, which greatly improves bandwidth, latency and reliability. Third, more spatial streams are supported, with a maximum number of 16 spatial streams per radio frequency, theoretically more than twice the physical transmission rate compared to Wi-Fi 6.
In addition, Wi-Fi 7 also supports collaborative scheduling between multiple APs, which can unify resources and interference such as time domain and frequency domain in the apnies of the whole network. Including collaborative spatial multiplexing (CoSR), collaborative quadrature frequency division multiple access (Co-OFDMA), collaborative beamforming (CoBF) and other features, which will greatly improve the utilization of air interface resources.
Based on the above characteristics, Wi-Fi 7 can help industrially manufactured all-wireless products to achieve flexible production, help mine areas to achieve unmanned mining, and realize automatic robot inspection. At the same time, with the characteristics of high bandwidth and low latency, Wi-Fi 7 will also greatly promote the rapid development of metaverse, edge computing and other scenario applications.
Even if the global Wi-Fi 7 technical specifications have not yet been settled at this stage, driven by new concepts and new applications such as meta-universe, automatic driving, and AIOT, the industry is naturally generally optimistic about the development of the subsequent market.
Giants grab the beach and stage a new round of competition
The Wi-Fi 6 competition is in the ascendant, and Wi-Fi 7 has ushered in a new giant competition. Since 2022, MediaTek, Broadcom, qualcomm three major manufacturers have successively released Wi-Fi 7 main control chips or related technologies and solutions. Among them, MediaTek demonstrated its Wi-Fi 7 live in January this year.
It is reported that MediaTek Wi-Fi 7 can transmit 2.4 times faster than Wi-Fi 6 through 320MHz channel and 4K quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) technology, and the peak speed can reach 30Gbps.
At the same time, MediaTek Wi-Fi 7 demonstrates multilink operation (MLO) technology, which aggregates multiple channels on different frequency bands at the same time, so that data can be transmitted seamlessly even if the band is disturbed or congested, enabling faster and more reliable network connectivity.
In addition, MediaTek Wi-Fi 7 features a Multi-User Resource Unit (MRU) to reduce and avoid signal interference, enabling multiple people to connect simultaneously and at high speeds.
In April 2022, Broadcom launched the WiFi 7 SoC, which features a quad-core Armv8 processor capable of delivering 24 DMIPS performance, and released a Wi-Fi 7 ecosystem portfolio that includes multiple models for consumer and enterprise products, as well as for mobile devices. It is reported that Broadcom is providing Customers with Wi-Fi 7 samples.
Qualcomm released the world's first Wi-Fi 7 chip commercial solution FastConnect 7800, which supports high-frequency multi-connection concurrency technology, 4K QAM modulation technology, support for 2.4GHz, 5GHz, 6GHz three major frequency bands, peak transmission speed up to 5.8Gbps, peak downlink up to 5.8Gbps, support for less than 2ms latency.
In addition, in recent times, ZTE 5G launched the Mc888 Flagship, the 5G CPE product of the Wi-Fi 7 standard, which integrates Wi-Fi 7 high concurrency technology and 5G high speed, and the peak rate of network download is as high as 10Gbps.
Coincidentally, New H3C also released enterprise-level native Wi-Fi 7 AP, which supports iRadio, iStation, iEdge and iHeal technologies, and it is reported that channel utilization has increased by 56%, terminal access efficiency by 33%, service transmission channels by 220%, and network operation and maintenance time by 30%.
Write at the end
From Wi-Fi 5 to Wi-Fi 6 to Wi-Fi 7, Wi-Fi technology standards continue to evolve, and corresponding chips, solutions, and hardware terminals will surely follow. And the development of AIoT requires Wi-Fi to have higher transmission speeds and greater transmission bandwidth. Standing at the node leading to Wi-Fi 7, we have reason to believe that with the giants constantly participating and competing, WiFi 7 is expected to play a greater role in the future.