Wi-Fi 7 will be 2024’s fanciest new tech to hit the home thanks to its advanced wireless features and improved latency. The Wi-Fi Alliance is now officially certifying devices that support Wi-Fi 7 so within the next few months, we’ll see tech and modems available for mass use.
Wi-Fi 7 is set to take over the home just as aggressively as the current standard – Wi-Fi 6E. Of course, the standard comes with some major advantages for the consumer too. Wi-Fi 7 promises almost zero latency and huge speed gains over Wi-Fi 6E making it ideal for almost every user.
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Some Wi-Fi 7 routers are already available to the public but might not be officially certified just yet. That doesn’t mean they aren’t Wi-Fi 7 compatible, however. Netgear, MSI and TP-Link are brands with Wi-Fi 7 routers on the market. Keep in mind that these already-available products may or may not get the Wi-Fi Alliance’s certification. Mainly because they are already available. That doesn’t mean they won’t support Wi-Fi 7.
Wi-Fi 7 offers double the channel bandwidth over Wi-Fi 6E from 160MHz to 320MHz. This allows for speeds of over two gigabits per second on a wireless frequency which is crazy in theory. The tech also supports the newly-debuted Multi-Link Operation. This feature bonds connections together across 2.4GHz, 5GHz and 6GHz bands creating a more stable system. It also means that when walking out of range of one band, the system won’t need to reconnect you to another. Great for mesh setups.
Wi-Fi 7 might get drowned in a lot of marketing gimmicks so be warned. For example, brands will advertise it as the only spectrum to support 8K video streaming. However, that isn’t the case. Most 8K content is already highly compressed. Even online streaming content gets the compression treatment. These files are already sizeable enough for Wi-Fi 6E to handle
The big deal for Wi-Fi 7 is its pure speed improvement. It means files will download faster and network content will transfer faster. Of course, you’ll need to have the right equipment. Both the router and your mobile device/notebook/PC will have to support Wi-Fi 7 to truly benefit from the advancement.
If you have Wi-Fi 6E and you’re barely hitting the threshold, Wi-Fi 7 will mean nothing to you. But if you’re waiting to squeeze more juice out of your tech, then it will definitely help. However, outside of the speed, Wi-Fi 7 also comes with some other useful features. For example, the OFDMA technique allows routers to cram extra data into a so-called “carrier wave”. As a result, bottlenecks with wireless traffic will no longer be an issue as Wi-Fi 7 ignores congested channels and completely bypasses the interference.
The Wi-Fi Alliance seems to be certifying Wi-Fi 7 devices as they prepare to launch. The new MSI Claw portable gaming device is an upcoming piece of tech that packs the latest standard. 2024 will likely be filled with loads of new tech slapped with Wi-Fi 7 on the front.
