Driving the Network of the Future: Exploring the New Features and Potential of WiFi 7-QCN9274

Just as we're finally seeing a slew of Wi-Fi 6 and Wi-Fi 6E devices making their way into homes and offices, a new Wi-Fi standard is emerging. It promises to improve upon current standards by bringing higher data rates, lower latency, the ability to handle more connected devices, and more.

We know – you’ve probably heard of this technique before. But this time, the next step for Wi-Fi is indeed a giant leap forward, at least in terms of speed. The new wireless standard is called Wi-Fi 7, or, if you prefer the classic Wi-Fi technical terminology, "802.11be." It's still in development, but it's sure to spawn a slew of new routers, mesh systems, and client devices when it launches.

What is Wi-Fi 7? Isn't Wi-Fi 6 cutting edge yet?

Wi-Fi 6 only offers higher speeds than Wi-Fi 5, but Wi-Fi 7 is all about lightning-fast connections. For this reason, the industry term has been established as "802.11be EHT", or Extremely High Throughput. Here's why: While technical specifications are still being developed, the new standard can deliver nominal peak data rates in excess of 40Gbps. This is amazing. From this perspective, Wi-Fi 7 will be more than four times faster than Wi-Fi 6 and Wi-Fi 6E, with a maximum data rate of 9.6Gbps, nearly six times that of Wi-Fi 5, and a maximum of 6.9Gbps.

In addition to delivering previously unreachable data rates, Wi-Fi 7 will feature new technologies to reduce latency, increase network capacity, and improve efficiency. These are the claims and buzzwords you may be familiar with as Wi-Fi 6 devices begin rolling out in 2019.

Of course, the new standard will be backwards compatible with Wi-Fi 6 devices, as well as older Wi-Fi 5 (802.11ac) and Wi-Fi 4 (802.11n) devices. But as with previous versions of Wi-Fi, your client devices need to support the specification (in this case, 802.11be) in their circuits to unlock the full potential of Wi-Fi 7.

Wi-Fi 7 technical basics explained

When Wi-Fi 6 officially launched two years ago, it ushered in several new wireless technologies designed to improve overall performance, including Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA); Multi-User, Multiple-Input, Multiple-Output (MU-MIMO) ); and target wake time (TWT). These will still be present in Wi-Fi 7 with some minor tweaks, so it's worth explaining how they work in the current Wi-Fi 6 standard.

Simply put, OFDMA divides the channel into resource units (RUs), allowing smaller packets to be transmitted to multiple users simultaneously. This helps reduce latency and utilize network resources more efficiently.

With MU-MIMO, wireless routers use different spatial streams to allow data to be transmitted simultaneously, providing higher performance for applications such as video streaming and online gaming. TWT helps extend the battery life of client devices by allowing them to remain asleep until network access is required. The Wi-Fi 7 standard will build on these (and other) existing Wi-Fi 6 and Wi-Fi 6E technologies and introduce some new technologies.

What frequency bands will Wi-Fi 7 operate on?

Like Wi-Fi 6E, Wi-Fi 7 routers and clients will operate on the 2.4GHz, 5GHz, and 6GHz radio bands. The new standard will provide enhanced OFDMA operation using multiple resource units (MRUs) designed to further reduce latency and interference. The biggest improvement is doubling MU-MIMO streams to 16. This is a key driver for the industry to be able to tout such huge overall throughput improvements compared to Wi-Fi 6.

Additionally, Wi-Fi 7 will introduce Multi-Link Operation (MLO) technology, which allows devices to send and receive data simultaneously on multiple radio bands to create a single aggregated connection. Not only will this provide faster throughput performance, but it will also help reduce latency and allow data to be unencumbered by network traffic or interference.

Wi-Fi 7 will introduce Multi-Link Operation (MLO) technology, which allows devices to send and receive data simultaneously on multiple radio frequency bands.

Wi-Fi 7 is also expected to offer a restricted target wake time feature, allowing routers to reserve bandwidth for certain types of data transfers. The benefit of this is to save client battery life while optimizing network resources.

How fast is Wi-Fi 7?

There's one more critical step in Wi-Fi 7's quest to increase data rates: The new protocol will provide more channel bandwidth than ever before.

Huge advances in Wi-Fi in the past have increased the number of frequency bands available for communication between routers and all your devices. Is the original 2.4GHz band too crowded in your home? If you have a Wi-Fi 6E-enabled device, you can switch to the 5GHz band or even the 6GHz band. But the width of these bands also has an impact on eliminating interference and increasing speeds.

All things being equal, wider channels allow for faster throughput and less interference. How broad are we talking? We see channel width double from 80MHz in Wi-Fi 5 to 160MHz in Wi-Fi 6. Wi-Fi 7 will double that again and offer 320MHz of channel bandwidth across the 2.4GHz, 5GHz and 6GHz radio bands. Wi-Fi 7 may also include a concept called "puncturing," which prevents interference on one part of the channel from rendering the rest of the channel unavailable.

Through "puncturing," Wi-Fi 7 prevents interference on one part of the channel from blocking the rest of the channel.

Additionally, Wi-Fi 7 will support 4096 Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (QAM), up from the 1024 QAM in Wi-Fi 6. The added signal modulation can improve throughput by 20% over Wi-Fi 6.

WiFi 7 Product----DR9274-5G6G QCN9274 CHIP

Features

■ Qualcomm Atheros QCN9274 for Industrial Grade;

■ Maxim Tx power 22dBm per chain;

■ 2x2 5G & 2x2 6G MU-MIMO, up to 8,647Mbps physical data rate;

■ Support up to 4096-QAM;

■ M.2 connector;

■ PCI Express 3 .0 Interface