Follow Liliputing, Taiwanese chipmaker MediaTek says it has demonstrated Wi-Fi 7 hardware to customers and industry partners. Wi-Fi 7, also known as 802.11be, is still a work in progress and specifications are not yet finalized, MediaTek says the first Wi-Fi 7 products are expected to launch in 2023, supporting faster speeds and reducing network congestion.
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Wi-Fi 7 technology is expected to appear next year |
The Wi-Fi Alliance says 802.11be will support a maximum throughput of 30 Gbps or more – a big step up from the peak speeds of 9.6 Gbps available with Wi-Fi 6.
MediaTek says its Wi-Fi 7 Filogic system uses “multi-link operation (MLO) technology to aggregate multiple channels on different frequency bands simultaneously to deliver improved performance even in the presence of interference.” or congestion on one or more network bands. Other improvements expected to come to MediaTek’s Wi-Fi 7 include support for 320MHz channels, 4K-QAM support, and reduced latency. Overall, Wi-Fi 7 will increase data transfer speeds by 2.4 times compared to Wi-Fi 6.
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However, even if the Wi-Fi 7 standard is adopted quickly and the first devices to support the technology appear next year, it could be a few more years before 802.11be becomes the standard. Like most Wi-Fi standards, it is backward compatible with older hardware devices.
The arrival of Wi-Fi 7 with performance that rivals some of the fastest wired networks is said to be necessary to meet the growing demands of more and more internet-connected devices, the growth of streaming 4K (even 8K) video streaming, game streaming, and smart home tech.
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