Wi-Fi 7
- [The University of Chicago]
- Overview
When compared to Wi-Fi 6, Wi-Fi 7 (or 802.11be) will also use multi-band/multi-channel aggregation and operation and deliver higher spectrum and power efficiency, better interference mitigations, higher capacity density and higher cost efficiency. The seventh generation of Wi-Fi is also referred to as Wi-Fi Extremely High Throughput as result of its projected ability to support up to 30Gbps throughput, roughly three times faster than Wi-Fi 6.
There are a number of proposed features for the Wi-Fi 7 standard, but direct enhancements over Wi-Fi 6 include support of 320 MHz transmissions, which is double the 160 MHz of 802.11ax, the use of higher modulation orders, optionally supporting 4096-QAM — up from 1024-QAM in 802.11ax — and the allocation of multiple resource units, such as groups of OFMDA tones.
One of the main goals of Wi-F 7 is to increase capacity and data rates above the 9.6 GBPS of Wi-Fi 6 in those 160 MHz channels with 1024-QAM and 8 spatial streams. In Wi-Fi 7, the maximum data rate is 46 GBPS in a 320 MHz chanel in 6 GHz and one 160 MHz channel in 5 GHz, with 4096-QAM and 16 spatial streams. The doubling of spatial streams and the doubling of channel bannwidths result in an increase of 4.8 times in throughput from Wi-Fi 6 to Wi-Fi 7.
