What Is WiFi 7 & Should You Care?
1Most of the new phones on the market today launch with Wi-Fi 6 or the newer 6E standard with the latter only meant as a transitional step before the inevitable debut of Wi-Fi 7 devices. A new report from DigiTimes backed by IC inspection labs suggests that the first batch of Wi-Fi 7 phones are expected to debut on the market in the second half of 2024. As usual, Samsung will be one of the pioneers of the new Wi-Fi standard with its Galaxy S24 expected to be among the first phones on the market to support Wi-Fi 7.
What does that mean in terms of speed? Wi-Fi 7 is expected to offer 2.4x faster peak speeds compared to Wi-Fi 6 with the Wi-Fi Organization citing values of up to 33Gbps. Wi-Fi 7 devices will be able to use 300MHz channels and will bring physical (PHY) and medium access control (MAC) improvements while still working with existing 2.4GHz, 5GHz and 6GHz frequencies. Qualcomm already unveiled Wi-Fi 7 Networking Pro Series Wi-Fi chips and we should see the first batch of Wi-Fi 7 home routers and laptops in early 2024.