Work on the Wi-Fi 7 standard will be completed by the Wi-Fi Alliance in the first quarter of 2024, according to a new Alliance subpage via Linkedin. This announcement was made at the end of October ( ) in the Beacon blog, albeit in lowercase type to tone down the statements.
The “Wi-Fi CERTIFIED 7” program, as it is officially called, will be based on the 802.11be standard. Certified hardware will be particularly important for interoperability between devices, be they Wi-Fi routers, laptops or smartphones equipped with a Wi-Fi 7 radio.
Wi-Fi 7 brings with it three major innovations. Wide channels of 320 MHz are permitted. However, the usefulness of these channels depends on the region. Not all countries allow full use of the 6 GHz band introduced by Wi-Fi 6E. It is not yet known whether the upper band will be available in Europe (
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Bandwidth is also expected to be increased by 4K QAM (4096 QAM), which is the maximum number of constellation points that can be arranged in a digital package. With Wi-Fi 6 it is still 1024 QAM. At best, this allows for a 20% increase in data throughput on Wi-Fi 7 (802.11be).
Multi Link Operation (MLO) is intended to offer additional advantages in terms of bandwidth and redundancy and enable the connection of the three radio bands. Devices can transmit on several bands at the same time and distribute their data, which is roughly comparable to carrier aggregation in mobile communications.
The question of how well Wi-Fi 7 devices already on the market comply with the current standard is an important one that has not yet been answered. Some market participants fear a situation similar to that with the 802.11n standard, when several manufacturers brought “Draft-n” devices onto the market years before the standard was actually introduced. Years before the standard was actually adopted.
However, the network manufacturers were still relatively transparent about the draft situation at the time and at least emphasized the topic with the word “draft”. However, the number of Wi-Fi 7 routers that have actually come onto the market so far is tiny. In addition, they are often very expensive. A firmware update should resolve any potential issues.
Like Notebookcheck.com, the Wi-Fi Alliance will also be present at CES in Las Vegas in January. We can therefore expect many new developments in the field of WLAN hardware.