Amazing speed: Wi-Fi 7 routers will finally replace Wi-Fi 6 routers in future

Amazing speed: Wi-Fi 7 routers will finally replace Wi-Fi 6 routers in future.

Looking at it, the summer of 2022 is coming, and the person to be thankful every summer must be the mother of WiFi, Heidi Rama, who coexists with beauty and wisdom.

Previously, when 5G was first commercialized, some people thought that when 5G came, it might be the time when WiFi was withdrawn. But it turns out that even in 2022, WiFi will still be an integral part of life.

Wireless communication technology, as an important technology that changes our lives, plays an important role in cooperating with cellular network traffic offloading.

With the development of WLAN technology, families and enterprises are increasingly relying on Wi-Fi, and will It serves as the main means of accessing the network.

According to IDC data, global WiFi chip shipments will reach 4.9 billion in 2022. Mobile communication technology is being updated and iterated, and WiFi technology is also constantly developing. Before you know it, WiFi 7 has quietly arrived.

WiFi 7: Lightning fast connection

In recent years, the emergence of new applications such as 4K and 8K video, VR/AR, gaming, telecommuting, online video conferencing, and cloud computing has continuously increased the requirements for network throughput and latency. Early Stages of Fi Development

. And WiFi 7 is the next-generation Wi-Fi standard. Although there is more than one next-generation Wi-Fi standard, “WiFi 7” is just a commercial symbol used by the WiFi Alliance for the promotion of ordinary consumers, but it generally refers to the one that has not yet been finally approved. A new specification for WiFi devices based on the 802.11be draft released in May 2021.

According to reports, the entire protocol standard of WiFi 7 will be released in accordance with two Releases.

Release 1 is expected to release the standard by the end of 2022; Release 2 is expected to start in early 2022 and complete the standard release by the end of 2024. If Wi-Fi 6, released in 2019, only offered higher speeds than Wi-Fi 5, Wi-Fi 7 is all about delivering lightning-fast connections.

From the data point of view, Wi-Fi 7 is expected to support a throughput of up to 30Gbps, with a maximum network speed of 46.4Gbps, which is 4.8 times the maximum network speed of WiFi 6 of 9.6Gbps.

From the above figure, compared to the previous WiFi 4, WiFi 5, WiFi 6, WiFi 6E, WiFi 7 has introduced new technologies or improved existing technologies in terms of frequency band, maximum bandwidth, modulation method, MIMO, etc.

Continue to introduce 6GHz frequency band and support maximum 320MHz bandwidth

Wi-Fi 7 will take full advantage of the new 6GHz band (actually 5.925-7.125GHz). 6GHz WiFi is different from 6G, 6GHz refers to the frequency band currently used in Wi-Fi networks and was first supported in Wi-Fi 6E, while 6G represents the 6th generation standard for broadband cellular network technology.

Compared to 2.4GHz, 5GHz, etc., 6GHz operates on a higher frequency band and provides greater bandwidth, which translates into faster speeds and more capacity for high-bandwidth and low-latency activities like streaming, gaming, etc. .

Currently, the 6GHz band is only occupied by Wi-Fi applications, and using it causes much less interference than the 2.4GHz or 5GHz bands. For faster connection, Wi-Fi 7 adds new bandwidth modes from the original 160MHz in Wi-Fi 6, including continuous 240MHz, discontinuous 160+80MHz, continuous 320MHz and discontinuous 160+160MHz.

Introduce Multi-Link multi-link mechanism

In order to achieve efficient use of all available spectrum resources, Wi-Fi 7 defines technologies related to multi-link aggregation, mainly including the MAC architecture of enhanced multi-link aggregation, multi-link channel access and multi-link transmission and other related technologies , which can combine multiple channels of different frequencies together to provide better network performance.

Wi-Fi 7 attempts to enhance these links by increasing throughput, which is measured between devices in a local network (LAN).

Introduce higher order 4096-QAM modulation technology

In order to further increase the rate, Wi-Fi 7 will introduce 4096-QAM, so that the modulation symbol carries 12 bits. Under the same encoding, Wi-Fi 7’s 4096-QAM can achieve 20% faster rate than Wi-Fi 6’s 1024-QAM.

Support for more data streams, enhanced MIMO capabilities

In Wi-Fi 7, the number of spatial streams is increased from 8 in Wi-Fi 6 to 16, which theoretically can more than double the physical transmission rate.

Supporting more data streams will also bring more powerful features – distributed MIMO, which means that 16 data streams can be provided not by one access point, but by multiple access points at the same time, which means more The APs need to work cooperatively with each other.

lower latency

Techniques such as MLO and wider channels mentioned above will further reduce network latency and make it more predictable.

Giants grab the beach layout

Even if the global WiFi 7 technical specifications have not been finalized at this stage, driven by new concepts and applications such as Metaverse, autonomous driving, and AIOT, the industry is naturally optimistic about the development of the follow-up market.

Facing the objective blue ocean market in the future, the leading WiFi chip manufacturers will naturally have to seize the opportunity. Since 2022, Broadcom, Qualcomm, and MediaTek have successively released WiFi 7 main control chips or demonstrated their related technologies.

Broadcom

Broadcom was the first vendor to announce a complete Wi-Fi 7 portfolio, and in April, Broadcom launched its first Wi-Fi 7 SoC, called the BCM4916, featuring a quad-core Armv8 processor with 64KB of L1 cache and 1MB of The L2 cache, capable of delivering 24 DMIPS of performance. The SoC supports DDR3 and DDR4 memory, as well as 2.5 Gbps and 10 Gbps network interfaces, and provides a USB 3.2 interface.

In addition, Broadcom announced its WiFi 7 ecosystem product portfolio, including the BCM6726 and BCM67263 for consumer products, the BCM43740 and BCM73720 for enterprise products, and the BCM4398 for mobile devices.

The BCM6726 supports the 2.4, 5 and 6 GHz frequency bands, and the BCM67263 only supports the 6 GHz frequency band. Currently, in the WiFi 7 space, Broadcom is sampling to major customers.

Qualcomm

At the end of February this year, Qualcomm launched the world’s first WiFi 7 chip “FastConnect 7800”.

FastConnect 7800 fully supports all the features of Wi-Fi 7, supports 2.4GHz, 5GHz, 6GHz three frequency bands, supports high-frequency multi-connection concurrent technology, 4-channel dual-frequency and features extended to high-frequency bands, 4K QAM modulation technology, peak transmission speed can be Up to 5.8Gbps, up to 60% higher than the previous generation, and supports latency below 2ms.

Qualcomm claims that compared to the previous generation, it can provide 50% lower power consumption, 2 times faster pairing speed, and 2 times wider signal reception range.

At present, FastConnect 7800 has been sampled and is expected to be put into commercial use in the second half of this year. The first customers include Acer, Asus, Honor, Meta (Facebook), OPPO, Tencent, vivo, Xiaomi, etc.

MediaTek

In January this year, MediaTek conducted the world’s first live demonstration of WiFi 7. It is reported that compared to the 160MHZ channel of WiFi 6, MediaTek WiFi 7 can use 320MHz channel and 4K Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (QAM) technology.

Under the condition of using the same number of antennas, the transmission speed is 2.4 times faster than WiFi 6, and the peak speed is completely It can reach 30Gbps defined by IEEE 802.11be.

In addition, MediaTek’s WiFi 7 will also support 2.4G, 5G, 6G multiple WiFi frequency bands, and use multi-link operation (MLO) technology to aggregate multiple channels on different frequency bands at the same time, reduce delay, and meet the needs of different devices and scenarios.

High-speed link requirements, with multi-user resource unit (MRU) function to reduce and avoid signal interference, to meet the simultaneous, high-speed connection of many people.

MediaTek revealed that products using WiFi 7 technology are expected to be available in 2023. In addition to the WiFi main control chip, different WiFi technologies have different requirements for RF products.

Since the WiFi 5 standard, WiFi RF front-end chips have been gradually externalized. The process requirements are also higher.

Vendors including Qorvo have also begun to strengthen the deployment of Wi-Fi 7 chip front-end modules (FEMs).

In January of this year, Qorvo introduced the first wideband front-end module (FEM) covering the 5.1 GHz to 7.1 GHz frequency band. This new tri-band FEM not only maximizes capacity, but also simplifies design, reduces time to market, and integrates Front-end board space is reduced by 50%.

Although this FEM is mainly to improve the tri-band Wi-Fi 6E function, the expansion of frequency band coverage has also shown that Qorvo is bound to win the Wi-Fi 7 chip FEM.

Sum up:

In 2019, the birth of the Wi-Fi 6 standard and market demand brought great opportunities for chip and cellphone manufacturers.

The upcoming Wi-Fi 7 is bound to be a new opportunity for networking and cellphone manufacturers and push manufacturers to speed up technology development and upgrading.

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Amazing speed: Wi-Fi 7 routers will finally replace Wi-Fi 6 routers in future