Wi-Fi 7 is coming! Are domestic manufacturers ready?
On January 8, 2024 local time, the Wi-Fi Alliance officially announced the launch of the Wi-Fi CERTIFIED 7 certification program, which can improve Wi-Fi 7 (802.11be) performance and improve connectivity between different Wi-Fi 7 ™ devices in various environments. This also means that Wi-Fi 7 is finally officially launched! It is expected that we will see a series of Wi-Fi 7-enabled mobile phones, laptops, routers, AR/VR/XR and other devices this year.
According to the introduction, Wi-Fi 7's cutting-edge features enable innovations that rely on high throughput, low latency, and higher reliability. For example, Wi-Fi 7 will outperform existing standards for high-bandwidth streaming and low-latency wireless gaming, which is critical given the growing popularity of virtual reality and the increasing frequency of online work and meetings.
While there are some Wi-Fi 7 devices on the market, they may not be able to easily interconnect with other Wi-Fi 7 devices without Wi-Fi CERTIFIED 7 ™ certification. While Wi-Fi 7 is backwards compatible with previous Wi-Fi versions, older devices don't benefit from Wi-Fi 7 routers, but newer Wi-Fi CERTIFIED 7 certified devices do.
Wi-Fi CERTIFIED 7 pushes the boundaries of today's wireless connectivity, and Wi-Fi CERTIFIED ™ helps ensure that advanced features are deployed in a consistent manner to deliver a high-quality user experience, according to the Wi-Fi Alliance. Advanced features include:
320 MHz channel: Available in countries where Wi-Fi is available in the 6 GHz band, ultra-wide channels are twice as wide as the current widest channel for Wi-Fi (160 MHz).
While doubling the bandwidth, WiFi 7 can also support up to 16 antennas to transmit and 16 antennas to receive signals (16 x 16), which is twice as many signals as the previous generation of standard 8 antennas, helping to achieve transmission speeds and throughput of up to 46Gbps, reaching 4.8 times that of Wi-Fi 6.
Multilink operation (MLO): Allows devices to transmit and receive data simultaneously over multiple links to increase throughput, reduce latency, and improve reliability.
This is essentially a type of wireless link aggregation, which is a bonded connection spread over two or three frequency bands in the 2.4 GHz, 5 GHz, and 6 GHz bands, providing users with greater speed and stability. In other words, when a user is out of range of an AP signal, it does not mean that the user must reconnect to connect to another AP.
MLO also offers a latency advantage. Usually device connections are limited by talk time, which is the amount of time it takes for a router to cycle through other routers that queue up to send packets over the network. Since all three bands are available at the same time, packets can be sent out immediately. It is estimated that compared with routes without multi-link aggregation technology, the speed can be increased by up to 92% and the latency can be reduced by 77%.
4K QAM (Quadrature Amplitude Modulation): By increasing the modulation rate to 4096 QAM, each OFDM subcarrier can encode 12-bit data, resulting in a 20% increase in peak PHY data rates over 1024 QAM. This also means that latency can be reduced by 20%;
512 Compressed Block Ack：提高效率并减少开销 ；
Multi-RUs correspond to a STA: improve the flexibility of spectrum resource scheduling and improve spectrum efficiency.
With WiFi 6, each user can only transmit or receive on the allocated resource unit (RU), which significantly limits the flexibility of spectrum resource scheduling, to solve this problem and further improve spectrum efficiency, WiFi 7 allows multiple RUs to be assigned to a single user, and RUs can be combined to improve transmission efficiency.
Preamble Puncturing: Previously busy channels meant that the frequency band could not be used to the fullest, and data could only be sent through the main channel. Now, with Preamble Puncturing technology, it can automatically skip channels blocked by interference, improving transmission efficiency and reducing latency, bringing a more stable network experience.
Trigger Uplink Access: Optimize Wi-Fi 6-defined trigger uplink access to accommodate latency-sensitive flows and meet QoS requirements;
Emergency Preparedness Communications Services (EPCS): Provide users with a seamless national security and emergency preparedness (NSEP) service experience while maintaining the priority and quality of service of the Wi-Fi access network.
The Wi-Fi Alliance expects Wi-Fi 7 to see rapid adoption across a broad ecosystem, with more than 233 million devices expected to enter the market by 2024 and grow to 2.1 billion devices by 2028. Smartphones, PCs, tablets, and access points (APs) will be the earliest adoptersWi-Fi 7, client premises equipment (CPE), and augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR) devices adopters will continue to gain early market traction.
"The launch of Wi-Fi CERTIFIED 7 marks the advent of the latest generation of Wi-Fi and will accelerate the mass adoption of Wi-Fi 7," said Kevin Robinson, President and CEO of the Wi-Fi Alliance. This certification underscores our relentless commitment to delivering cutting-edge technologies that redefine the way users experience Wi-Fi, delivering faster speeds, greater efficiency, and greater reliability, expanding the possibilities of Wi-Fi. ”
Companies such as Broadcom, CommScope, RUCKUS Networks, Intel, MaxLinear, MediaTek and Qualcomm make up the certification test platform and will launch the first Wi-Fi CERTIFIED 7-enabled devices.
Overview of the Wi-Fi 7 upstream supply chain
The difficulties of Wi-Fi 7 chips are still in terms of IP maturity, Wi-Fi compatibility, and performance optimization experience in application scenarios. In general, the design is very difficult, and it requires a lot of manpower and capital investment.
From the perspective of Wi-Fi 7 chip suppliers, Broadcom (such as BCM4916), Qualcomm (such as FastConnect 7800), MediaTek (Filogic 880/860 and Filogic 380/360), and Intel (Killer 1750x) have all launched chips that support the Wi-Fi 7 standard.
In contrast, although there is a significant gap between domestic Wi-Fi chip manufacturers and the above-mentioned international giants, there are also HiSilicon, ZTE, Espressif Technology, UNISOC and rising stars Kangxi Communications, Southern Silicon Valley, and Xiwei Technology with the ability to develop Wi-Fi 5 and Wi-Fi 6.
In terms of Wi-Fi 7 technology, domestic manufacturers such as Huawei HiSilicon, ZTE, and Unisplendour have also made some achievements.
In April 2023, Tsinghua Unigroup said in an institutional survey that the Wi-Fi 7 AP single-device delay launched by the company's H3C can be stable within 3ms, and the actual rate can exceed 10 gigabits, taking the lead in completing the industry's first Wi-Fi 7 AP test in China's Thiel Laboratory, refreshing the fastest Wi-Fi speed record, and the company's Wi-Fi 7 products have been put on sale.
In November 2023, Huawei officially announced that it had completed the industry's first Wi-Fi 7 AP performance test at Tolly Lab in the United States, with a performance of over 13 Gbit/s for the whole machine and a peak performance of over 4.33 Gbit/s for a single terminal. This data once again subverts all historical Wi-Fi performance test results, setting a new record for the fastest speed.
In December 2023, ZTE released its first Wi-Fi 7 router, the BE7200 Pro+, using its self-developed new-generation WiFi-7 SoC.
In terms of Wi-Fi 7 patents, the NGB report shows that Huawei's Wi-Fi 7 standard patents have contributed the most in the world, with a total of 482 patents, accounting for 22.9%, ranking first in the world. Qualcomm in second place accounted for 15.2%, and Intel in third place accounted for 9.5%.
In addition, ZTE ranked tenth with a share of 2.1%. ZTE also previously said on the interactive platform that it currently has more than 100 Wi-Fi 7 standard patents. OPPO ranked 18th with a 1% share.
Editor: Xinzhixun-Rogue Sword