I have to say that the little partner who named the 802.11ax protocol as WiFi 6.
Must be a genius!!!
Because if not the people who tinker with these things every day.
Who knows what 802.11n, 802.11ac, 802.11ax, 802.11be are, who is in front, who is behind...
Not like now after the change.
WiFi 4,WiFi 5,WiFi 6,WiFi 6E,WiFi 7 。。。
You see this clear naming, it is a beautiful thing.
Wait, I just looked down and picked up a chalk, this WiFi has iterated to 7?
I feel that when I bought a router a few days ago, I felt that the manufacturer still used support for WiFi 6 as a slogan...
Sure enough, I used this new name... Although the iterative relationship between each generation is seen more clearly.
However, this technological update, the sense of urgency of being "eliminated" by himself, was also immediately arranged.
So the question is, this WiFi 7, does it top use?
How many surprises will it bring us?
>/ The first thing is to get up
As a new generation of WiFi standards, it goes without saying that it has higher speeds and lower latency.
If this is not obvious, it is too much to look down on the big guys on IEEE (WiFi 7 is also called IEEE802.11be).
Here Tony checked some information a little, according to the theoretical technical indicators of WiFi 7, to give you a calculation to see what level its theoretical rate can run to.
If Tony's calculation is incorrect, then you are also welcome to correct it in the comment area.
First of all, this wiFi 7 can support 4096 QAM (which can be understood as an increase in the signal density transmitted), which is about 20% higher than the 1024 QAM of WiFi 6.
(For QAM friends, check out the previous article.)
WiFi 7 can also support 6 GHz compared to WiFi 6, and the maximum bandwidth it can provide has been increased from 160 MHz to 320 MHz, which can theoretically be directly doubled in transmission speed.
WiFi 7 can also support up to 16 antennas to transmit, 16 antennas to receive signals (16 x 16), compared to the previous generation of standard 8 antennas sent, 8 antennas receive signals also twice as many.
Such a hasty calculation, if the above three indicators can be full, theoretically the maximum rate of WiFi 7 can run to:
9.6 Gbps x 1.2 x 2 x 2 = 46 Gbps
Like Tony needs to be the next god every time he tests a new device, if the bad review office is equipped with a full WiFi 7 network.
The time it takes to download a 13GB proto-god may only take 2.26 seconds...
Well, theoretically...
>/ This wiFi is a bit clever
Don't look at the theoretical rate calculated above so fast, oh, we have a scale in our hearts, and the theoretical speed can only be regarded as the theoretical speed.
Look at how good WiFi 6 said back then, the maximum support is 9.6 Gbps, but now there are not many people who can run to this speed, and it is not too much to give a discount.
How much you can actually run, you have to look at the broadband rate at home, and the nearby network environment is not complicated...
The same goes for WiFi 7.
However, although it can't rush to the theoretical rate, the network experience improvement that WiFi 6 brings to us is real.
A large part of this is because WiFi 6 supports dual-band signals for the first time.
What is a dual-band signal? When many small partners turn on their own WiFi, they may find a small problem.
Why would this make two WiFi with the same name, but with different suffixes?
That's right, this is the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands supported by WiFi 6, so why does this make us happier on the Internet?
Tony took his own home as an example, opened the WiFi channel map and looked at it, and the frequency band above 2.4GHz was occupied.
Even a person who doesn't understand anything can also feel the congestion of the network from this picture, the front foot is next to the back foot, and it is all crowded together.
But switching to the 5 GHz band looks a lot fresher
Here we slightly add a point of knowledge, in layman's terms, the larger the number on the frequency band, the faster the communication of the signal, but the weaker the anti-interference ability of the signal.
That is, once the indoor terrain is complex (with many walls), the signal strength of 5 GHz is greatly weakened.
Although WiFi 6 can support 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz, it is not very smart to switch between these two frequency bands.
For example, if you connect WiFi 6 to the side of the router in the living room, the system will give you the 5 GHz band due to no interference.
As you walk toward the bedroom, as the walls grow, the signal gets worse and worse until 5 GHz stops, and the phone automatically switches to 2.4 GHz.
Looks pretty smart, if it's the other way around...
The phone does not actively switch from 2.4 GHz to 5 GHz.
Therefore, under the WiFi 6 protocol, although the network speed is greatly improved through the 5 GHz band.
But there is a lack of a flexible and intelligent scheduling model to connect them together.
In most cases, you still have to separate the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz frequency bands and manually connect them according to your own needs.
The frequency band that WiFi 7 can support is a higher level, it can support 2.4 GHz, 5 GHz, 6 GHz (6 GHz is not currently approved in China), these three frequency bands.
note! Here and WiFi 6 is a bit different, is supported at the same time.
This means that this WiFi 7 can support the automatic switching of these three frequency bands!
It can automatically swing the signal to the appropriate frequency band according to the strength of the signal.
It is also possible to achieve "self" load balancing, taking advantage of its own multi-channel advantages for concurrent data transfer.
This means that the problem of taking The WiFi 6 test has suddenly been solved.
>/ Wisdom is full in complex environments
Not only is there more support for the frequency bands where the signal is received, but WiFi 7 has also optimized support for multiple APs. (We can roughly understand that it can support multiple routers)
This is a very interesting feature.
Due to the limitation of power in a single router, the range of signal coverage is very limited.
This is also why sometimes only one router is installed at home, and there is no way to achieve full house signal coverage.
In larger scenarios such as companies or exhibitions, if you want to obtain a wide range of stable signals, you will generally achieve it through AC + AP, or MESH networking.
That is, the use of a plural number of network nodes to provide huge coverage.
But there are certain drawbacks to doing so.
In the pre-WiFi 7 standard, each AP and AP could not cooperate, but rather "fight separately", and a mobile phone could only establish communication with one AP at the same time.
When you go from "AP 1" to "AP 2", the system will kick you off the "AP 1" when it detects that the signal is weak, and then go to establish communication with "AP 2".
Although with the help of WiFi Fast Roaming Protocol (802.11k/v/r), it can give us a near-seamless AP switching experience.
But inevitably there will still be a momentary stutter.
With WiFi 7, signal inputs that support multiple AP nodes can be synchronized.
Under this standard, the WiFi signal accepted by a single phone can be provided by multiple sources at the same time.
As you walk around, you can lower the signal of the AP that is getting farther and farther away, while allowing you to accept the new signal of the AP signal that is getting stronger and stronger.
It's like the swimming pool in elementary school math that puts water on one side and holds water at the same time.
The water level (WiFi signal) can be dynamically stabilized, so that the momentary stuttering is also optimized.
>/ Do we need WiFi 7 now?
Well, there are so many new features of WiFi 7 mentioned above, but to be honest, WiFi 7 is far from us... It's still quite far away.
Don't look at the recent MediaTek, Qualcomm, New H3C, they all "launched" WiFi 7 from various angles.
But when this technology lands, transforms, and a series of operations come down, if we really want to experience WiFi 7, we may have to wait until 2024.
And now the release is still the server side, the terminal products that can really support WiFi 7 have not yet been rolled out.
And don't forget, every time a new technology comes out, the price is not beautiful.
WiFi 6 router price reduction refers to north ▼
In fact, some of the functions in WiFi 7 can actually find some shadows in the WiFi 6E standard released two years ago.
For example, support 6 Ghz, 4096 QAM these functions, these can bring us a higher network speed experience.
If you really have a need for internet speed, you may wish to buy a WiFi 6E router to try it out. ( Although the price is not cheap )
From this point of view, we don't have to wait for WiFi 7.
However, we will always need WiFi 7.
After all, this technology will not land for three or four years, and at that time, maybe AR, VR, MR, metaverse, or even some new things that have not yet been born.
There's always a guy who can make WiFi 7 serious.