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Wi-Fi 7 quietly took off while everyone was looking at AI
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this post was submitted on 12 Jan 2024
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I guess one reason why no one is paying attention to it is because is the Wi-Fi speed usually the limiting factor? In my case I've rarely ever maxed out my Wi-Fi 6 speeds. Typically the host or the network that I'm on that is the limiting factor.
Although I'm also in the US so I know where not know for having the fastest internet in the world. Maybe in other areas of the world WiFi 7 might be more useful.
Canada, one of our primary ISPs offers fibre to the home with speeds of 1Gbit and even higher. So many threads on their forums with users confused why they can't get anywhere close to 1Gbit and it always turns out to be WiFi.
I can get very close to 1 Gbit on Ethernet but top out at maybe 400 Mbps on wifi.
Exactly, wifi 7 will probably get us to or close to practical 1Gbit wireless speed vs theoretical 1Gbit speeds.
Wifi 6E already does that, I get about 940 Mbps with my phone on my 6GHz network. That is maybe 10 Mbps less than I get wired.
If you have a non-congested area, 6e is just as fast as 7. 7 just brings a wider channel width and the ability to hop between 6ghz and 5ghz.
I think we are quite a long time from 6E becoming congested. The equpiment is just too expensive right now (nevermind the price of Wifi 7 equipment). In my pretty densely populated area I have zero other 6GHz networks visible from my place.
There were so few 6E devices released, particularly consumer level ones that we can sort of just “skip” it when talking about home user Wifi issues.
I don't think we'll ever hit 6ghz congestion because it just doesn't go very far.
In downtown areas 2.4ghz wifi is basically useless, but 5ghz is still pretty serviceable thanks to it's lower range and more channels. 6ghz is just another 2.4 to 5ghz jump, but now we're getting down to single room levels of range.
I wonder about ping. Will it ever be on par with Ethernet for online gaming?
Single channel WiFi probably is unlikely to get to sub millisecond response timesas it is shared air time for both send and receive of all devices, wifi 7 multi link might help if it can route some traffic on different channels but over all I never expect it to get close to what wired Ethernet can do.
However, for the majority of people (basically exclude professional gaming) below 10ms will be perfectly fine and not noticeable at all, the importance of 6E wasn't it's speed but it's improvement on more consistent connections, if WiFi 7 can improve on this, it's a benefit to gamers and worth upgrading.
This is very useful in places like big city where there are gazillion of devices fighting for airtime. Wifi 7 devices can dynamically switch channel, or even use multiple channels at once which should help a lot in congested environment.
I'm more excited about reducing congestion when more of my neighbors upgrade to 6, so that BSS coloring and other wifi 6/7 features can enable more efficient use of the spectrum. Before wifi 6 most of the upgrades were just increasing data rates, but really lacking in improvements to spectral use efficiency (like the resource unit allocation in OFDMA which splits channels into sub carriers and centrally plans assignment to multiple client devices for simultaneous use which results in much less wasted airtime compared to each device yelling and listening while waiting to see if they can have exclusive access to the whole channel which wastes time) and interference management (like preamble puncturing which allows partial use of a channel when only a portion has interference). In a crowded environment like an apartment building wifi 6 should help a lot in reducing channel utilization.
I have one WiFi 6 access point and unless I'm running a benchmark while right next to it, I can't tell the difference between it and the WiFi 5 access points. I doubt WiFi 7 will make much difference unless you are running 320MHz channels. There's only enough bandwidth for 3 of them, so good luck getting decent performance unless you live out in the country though.
High speeds are helpful for anyone that has network storage and doesn't want to plug in an ethernet cable. It doesn't have anything to do with how fast your internet is.
They're is so much wrong here I don't know where to start.
get a better wifi 6ap. You should be getting about 2x the bandwidth. I get about 900mbps on my 5 year old cell phone sitting on the couch.
Wi-Fi 7 smaller width channels to avoid interference. Pretty much everything you've said here is backwards/wrong and i encourage you to do some learning on your own.
I'm using a Unifi U6-Lite access point and an Intel AX210 WiFi card on an 80MHz channel. Iperf showed about 600mbps down on WiFi 6 and 550 on WiFi 5 from across the room last time I tested it. There's no other WiFi networks anywhere near me to interfere with anything.
Smaller channels will avoid interference, but you get less bandwidth on them. The bitrate only increased 20% between WiFi 6 and 7. To get a large speed boost, you need the wider channels that WiFi 7 supports.
The lite, being the cheapest model in that line, unsurprisingly only supports 2x2 mimo. Getting 600mbps from that is actually really good, but given net bandwidth is nearly identical to what is available for wifi5 I'm not surprised you didn't see much of a difference.
An ap with 4x4 mimo would substantially outpace your wifi 5 router.
The AX210 only supports 2x2 MIMO and I haven't seen any WiFi 6 cards with more streams than that.
An AP with 4x4 MIMO would provide more bandwidth for multiple clients since WiFi 6 supports MU-MIMO in both directions.
On my Archer BE800 and AX201 equipped Thinkpad T14 I'm able to hit just over gigabit on speed tests. Your wifi 6 lite is only 2.4 and 5ghz which is probably why your speeds are so poor, especially if you have other devices on the network.
Unifis wifi 6 offerings were really disappointing. 2.4 5ghz wifi 6 only is just kinda stupid, and I think that's why it has had such lame reception (no pun intended). Wifi 6 with 6ghz is incredible. Wifi 6 on 5ghz is good. And wifi 6 on 2.4ghz is just kinda awful. It's not worse than anything previously on 2.4ghz, but it's just not a step up.
On a LAN? Pretty easily if you have a gigabit or greater network. Wi-Fi 6 can do close to gigabit but not consistently and needs to be close to an AP, and it's unlikely a bunch of devices using it at the same time will be able to do maintain that peak. Maybe 6E, although I don't have any devices myself that support it.
And WAN speeds of gigabit and greater have become more common, too.
And this ignores the improvements in latency with Wi-Fi 7, which is definitely an issue with traditional Wi-Fi.
Also the fact that the faster the wifi, the easier it is to block.
These new standards aren't really targeting residential use so just people shouldn't care.
Ok, I know why we changed the version naming scheme: a, b, g, n, ac, ax... It was a nightmare, just awful.
But I'll bet it does still have a IEEE designation, so how does 6 or 7 map to the previous scheme? Also, what's new, what are the impressive current speeds and features?
WiFi 7 = 802.11be, FYI
5 is AC, 6 is AX