Qualcomm announces upgrade to WiFi 6. WiFi 7 is the next generation wireless connectivity standard, which is expected to have twice the internet speed and half the latency (latency) compared to WiFi 6. While some devices are yet to support WiFi 6, an even faster wireless connectivity, WiFi 7, is being developed.
Announcing the new WiFi 7, Qualcomm said that it will focus on defining not only the features that will bring more speed and capacity but also significantly improve low latency performance. “The combination of latency, speed and capacity improvements in Wi-Fi 7 will be at the heart of the most advanced use cases across XR, Metaverse, social gaming, edge compute and more,” Qualcomm said in a blog post.
MediaTek, another chip maker was earlier quoted as saying that WiFi will be three times faster than WiFi 6. Not only this, WiFi 7 will bring a list of features including a powerful MLO feature, which will enable multiple link creation across multiple bands.
You must have read in the specs seat of most premium devices that they come with support for WiFi 6. You wonder what that is, but don’t care enough reading, you assume it has something to do with the speed of the WiFi and the higher the number, the better the speed. Going forward, you will get devices that will come with WiFi 7 support. So what does this really mean?
WiFi 7 is an upgrade to WiFi 6 and it claims to have three times the speed of WiFi 6. The new wireless connectivity standard will have a transmission rate of 30 Gbps. Now, if you compare WiFi 6 and WiFi 7, the next generation standard is a major upgrade over WiFi 6 which has a transmission rate of 9.6Gbps.
WiFi 7 uses 320 MHz single-channel bandwidth. This is also a major upgrade over WiFi 6, using only 160MHz of bandwidth. The increased bandwidth will allow more devices to connect to it. This will be especially useful in offices, restaurants and railway stations as it will allow more people to connect their devices to the network and speed will not be compromised.
WiFi 7 is introduced with some features which include multi-link capability, modulation development, flexible channel usage and 320 MHz channel bandwidth. According to Qualcomm, Wi-Fi 7’s multi-link capability provides multiple options for clients to use these channels.
