OMG! Friggin Wi-Fi 7 is HERE! (Sorta)

Are you ready to get like 46 Gbps over Wi-Fi?

ARE YOU?

Because if you’re not, well, you’re just a big fat loser. You gotta know that Wi-Fi 7 is buckets of wireless awesome that will friggin rewrite the ENTIRE STORY of Wi-Fi as we know it, Jack!

Or not.

Big News from the Wi-Fi Alliance

All that silliness aside, today the Wi-Fi Alliance announced it’s Wi-Fi CERTIFIED 7™ program. I also spoke with Kevin Robinson, the Alliance’s CEO, late last week about the news. Kevin is rightfully excited about the promise of Wi-Fi 7, but as a geezer who has been at this kind of juncture a few times before I can’t say that I’m all in. Kevin did share a bit about the benefit of the certification testing process in providing a modicum of “your product needs to support these specific things to wear our Certified 7 logo”, and the Alliance’s members will certainly benefit from the PR generated by the alliance.

But we’ve been here before, no?

Wi-Fi 7 is Interesting. But…

Let’s slow down the hype train for just a bit here. First, realize that “Wi-Fi 7” has no basis in any published IEEE standard, and it is the IEEE that defines the Wi-Fi standards- not the Wi-Fi Alliance. What the Alliance has decided to call Wi-Fi 7 is actually the 802.11be DRAFT standard. It’s not ratified yet. It’s not “here”, even though the Alliance is doing their CERTIFED 7™ thing.

That’s just how the WLAN industry goes… a lot of weird nuances. Speaking of weird nuances- the Alliance and it’s members are getting ready to promote the living hell out of 802.11be, and features like:

• 4K QAM
• 320 MHz wide channels
• Multilink MLO
• and more
  
  There’s not a lot of value in me creating yet another technical overview of these features, so let me refer you to Intel’s decent explainer. if you breeze through the Wi-Fi Alliance’s press release and the Intel Wi-Fi 7 tutorial, you might find yourself getting really jazzed about it all. Unfortunately, all is rarely what it seems in the world of Wi-Fi, where being a marketer means you get to live a fast and loose lifestyle often decoupled from reality.

I didn’t ask permission to use the response from the WLAN sage who gave it on X, so I chose to anonymize him or her for this blog. But this person is one of the single loudest and most articulate voices in the WLAN industry. The response reflects the skepticism that many of us feel when it comes to Wi-Fi 7.

With every single new standard, THE MARKETERS go right to the high end of what the standard technically allows under ideal conditions and with theoretical top-end hardware on both the infrastructure AND client sides, and they tend to promote the loftiest of numbers as if they were going to be the norm for everyone just by buying new products.

Newsflash: Wi-Fi 7 will be better, but it will be a fuzzy, hard-to-quantify kind of better. There are too many variables. For example, smartphones will stay at two spatial streams for the foreseeable future, but Wi-Fi 7’s biggest and sexiest numbers are based on the client and access points doing a whopping 16 spatial streams. And those 320 Mhz channels and 4K QAM? Neither will be commonplace. Both are more or less unicorns.

So what will be better about Wi-Fi 7?

MLO might be interesting- if it works. Meaning, if the many, many vendors that are part of the WLAN ecosystem can get it right individually.

More clients using the 6 GHz spectrum will be good thing. That’s an easy one.

Data rates and latency should be improved across the board, and client device battery life should also benefit. How do you reliably measure these beyond saying they will be better? 

You really can’t and have it be meaningful. Especially this early on.

What ISN’T Improving With the Wi-Fi Alliance’s CERTIFED 7™ Program?

Unfortunately, operational zingers that have caused us pain from the WLAN operations side for 20+ years don’t change with the new standard or the Alliance’s certification program. It’s still up to the vendors to define how their client devices roam, for example. There is still no clean delineation between Enterprise and Consumer client capabilities, but that line is palpable on the access point side and so Consumer-grade client devices brought into the Business WLAN can be a colossal pain in the ass.

Put it all together, and there ain’t nothing new under the wireless sun.

Related: I recently talked with David Coleman about the future of Wi-Fi. That’s right- David COLEMAN. I run in those circles, you realize.