Wi-Fi 7 officially here at long last
Higher speeds and smarter operation promised, an expensive proposition at first
Let’s face it, CES is all about new TVs and laptops these days: anything else does not seem to attract even remotely as much attention in terms of PR material or consumer interest. But, once in a while, something of interest to everyone comes along and that was the case with Wi-Fi 7 this year: after spending more than 24 months in a “beta state”, so to speak — a small number of compatible devices started appearing in 2023, but tech specs were not set in stone and there was also no certification program in place — the next mainstream consumer wireless standard is now finally here. The Wi-Fi Alliance officially launched Wi-Fi 7 at CES 2024, promising faster data transfer speeds and advanced features to more devices and marking another step forward for high-speed, low-latency connectivity.
The Wi-Fi 7 standard offers, in theory, data transfer speeds of up to 46 Gbps — nearly three times faster than those of the current Wi-Fi 6E standard. It should allow users to enjoy bandwidth-intensive applications like multiple 8K video streams, virtual reality and high resolution video conferencing without any perceptible lag. It used to be that IEEE, the Wi-Fi Alliance, Intel and MediaTek treated Wi-Fi 7 as the first true 10-Gigabit…
