What is the progress of WiFi 7 compared to WiFi 6?

2023.08.08

What is the progress of WiFi 7 compared to WiFi 6?


Overall, WiFi 7 has little impact on ordinary users in the early stages. But it brings new possibilities for scenario-based applications in various industries, such as industrial Internet and telemedicine.

WiFi 7 has become one of the hottest topics, especially after Qualcomm, H3C and other manufacturers released WiFi 7 commercial solutions, the discussion about WiFi 7 exploded again. So, what are the significant improvements of WiFi 7 compared to WiFi 6? For ordinary home users, do they need to upgrade to WiFi 7 now?

First of all, the wireless transmission rate of WiFi 7 has been greatly improved, jumping from 9.6Gbps of WiFi 6 to 30Gbps. This is mainly due to the expansion of frequency bands and wireless channels, as well as the upgrade of modulation methods.

What is the progress of WiFi 7 compared to WiFi 6?What is the progress of WiFi 7 compared to WiFi 6?

On the basis of 2.4GHz and 5GHz, WiFi 7 incorporates the 6GHz frequency band dedicated to WiFi 6E into the regular frequency band. From the perspective of wireless channels, WiFi 7 uses a 320MHz channel, which is double the 160MHz of WiFi 6. In terms of modulation, WiFi 7 uses 4096-QAM, while WiFi 6 is 1024-QAM.

However, according to user feedback, the user experience improvement of WiFi 6 is not obvious compared with WiFi 5, and the network speed is not up to the advertised data. Then WiFi 7 means little to ordinary home users. It is mainly for high-speed intranet transmission and AR/VR scenarios. For users with NAS, it will be faster to access stored data through WiFi 7. For AR/VR devices, lower latency and richer data experience can be obtained.

Overall, WiFi 7 has little impact on ordinary users in the early stages. But it brings new possibilities for scenario-based applications in various industries, such as industrial Internet and telemedicine. Ordinary home users don't need to follow the trend to install WiFi 7 devices, but for industry users, WiFi 7 has greater significance.