EE is working with Qualcomm to add Wi-Fi 7 to consumer broadband hubs
This article is completely inept. I&#x27;m nowhere near an expert in WiFi tech, but having done a lot of in-office WiFi setups over the past several years, it&#x27;s easy to see the differences in quality generation over generation.<p>&gt; Trouble is, the woes listed in the messaging are those that previous versions of services and wireless standards claimed to fix. If they didn&#x27;t fix them, why should we believe this lot will? If they did, what is Qualcomm actually saying? It&#x27;s a paradox.<p>Previous iterations of WiFi DID fix these problems. Modern &quot;WiFi 6&quot; is significantly better at handling many simultaneous clients than the old 802.11b&#x2F;g were. We&#x27;ve been through multiple generational improvements to the old scheme, such as,<p><pre><code>  - 802.11n using 5 GHz with lower penetration, making it easier to create more and smaller cells 
  - 802.11n introducing MIMO, leveraging airspace better 
  - 802.11ac introducing MU-MIMO, allowing simultaneous transmission for multiple clients 
  - 802.11ax expanding MU-MIMO into the frequency domain, making it more effective 
  - Much better and quicker channel reuse during potential collisions
  - Quicker transmission means the time slices clients DO get are more meaningful
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WiFi has gotten so much better over the past several years, that I suspect people just don&#x27;t remember how unreliable it was before. Part of this is because it&#x27;s been a gradual improvement, as new standards have come out, on-market hardware has slowly taken up these new features, and client devices need to be aged out and replaced before a newer device can make use of these newer features -- which users might just attribute to their new device being &quot;better&quot;, and not that the WiFi got better.<p>It&#x27;s not hard to look at the WiFi 7 (802.11be) Wikipedia page and see that it offers several improvements to handle increased client load,<p><pre><code>  - Multi-Access Point (AP) Coordination (e.g. coordinated and joint transmission)
  - Enhanced link adaptation and retransmission protocol (e.g. Hybrid Automatic Repeat Request (HARQ))
  - Enhanced resource allocation in OFDMA
  - Optimized channel sounding that requires less airtime
  - Implicit channel sounding
  - Support of direct links, managed by an access point
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&gt; There is no consumer problem of today, no domestic use case imaginable, where 50Gbps works where 10 will not.<p>WiFi quality is not dictated by the advertised transmission rate. That&#x27;s just the number hardware vendors love to advertise, because it keeps getting bigger and bigger generation-on-generation, whereas all these other improvements are much more nuanced and tough to communicate in marketing copy.<p>&gt; The 6GHz band, which in the US actually goes some way beyond 7GHz, is more easily blocked by walls and other physical stuff necessary for gracious living than 5GHz, so coverage problems won&#x27;t be fixed.<p>Which may actually be desirable. Less penetration through walls means smaller cells that don&#x27;t interfere (need to share airspace) with as many neighbors. This has been a boon in dense settings (office buildings, apartment buildings, public WiFi) during the 2.4 GHz -&gt; 5 GHz transition.<p>If you have a large house with many walls separating each room, you may now need more APs to cover the same area. But looking at the proliferation of mesh-based systems, it seems the market is already moving that way anyway.<p>&gt; It would be amazing if one in a hundred households notice an iota of difference if their current router magically sprouted Wi-Fi 7, and this won&#x27;t change much for the years it takes to get phones, laptops, and everything else with older versions of the standard upgraded. Good luck getting those managed end-to-end services up and running too.<p>And this is just uselessly defeatist. My current devices don&#x27;t support the new standard, so why bother? WiFi has seen tremendous advances in quality and capability over the past 15 years, and users have always realized those advances as their devices age out. Back in the 802.11g days, it would&#x27;ve been unheard of to have multiple TVs and iPads in a single apartment within a densely populated apartment building streaming 4K video over WiFi simultaneously.