Wi-Fi 7 at 40 gigabits per second, it’ll be four times as fast as Wi-Fi 6 | Hacker News Reader

Wi-Fi 7 at 40 gigabits per second, it’ll be four times as fast as Wi-Fi 6

spectrum.ieee.org

47 pointsystad18 comments

Calculated using 320Mhz and 16x16 MU-MIMO with 4K-QAM. I think it is time we start labelling this as WiFi Capacity instead of speed. There are no devices, now and in the future that will put that many antenna into it. Your phone is still stuck with 2x2 WiFi ( While 5G iPhone is on 4x4 ).

The great thing is that hopefully it will push vendors towards 5Gbps or 10Gps Ethernet.

How can you be so sure that future phones won't have so much more antennas? Is there a technical limitation (e.g. limited space) or too much cost per antenna that prevent it from happening?

Yes both Space ( in terms of 8x8 antenna+, ) and Cost. There is also the question of needs. Even Laptop are now going back to 2x2. With WiFi 6E, on a 2x2 you get 2.4Gbps max ( With 6Ghz Spectrum ), on WiFi 7 this get up to ~5.76Gbps. I know this isn't real world speed but I think it shouldn't be hard to achieve 1Gbps+ real world in half decent scenario. Which is plenty for Smartphone.

Broadcom also stopped making 4x4 WiFi chip, mostly because there isn't a market for it. It remains to be seen if Mediatek wants to test WiFi 4x4 Market again.

And to clarify to my original post ( cant edit any more ), I mean 4x4 antenna on LTE / 5G in iPhone 11+, not 4x4 on WiFi iPhone 5G.

Also I’m still struggling to see a purpose for that speed outside of a monitor connection.

So MAYBE wireless HDMI using Wi-Fi but that’s it. Can’t think of any other reason where you couldn’t just use a cable.

I am struggling too but capacity creates the needs. It won't be long before someone will find something to fo with it

Yeah but that hasn't happened. We've had ubiquitous wired ethernet for a decade now?

I know that 10g is big in datacenters, etc but outside of that (and even in offices and videoconferencing scenarios) the bandwidth hasn't been necessary.

Still comes down to specialized settings like video production which already have wired setups for these things for the reliability and predictability.

For consumer and mass market stuff, it's just not there. Video compression is only getting better, and 4k still barely has enough uptake, let alone 8k. And even 8k would comfortably sit within 1g.

And all pages still gonna load at 100mbps tops

Kinda amazing only use for such bandwidth (for me) is torrents. Especially useful when Apple TV/Netflix degrades to shit at peak times.

I’m surprised to hear that about Netflix, any issues I have are super rare and pretty random.

Depends on the population density where you live, how popular Netflix is and the bandwidth of the lines. In many dense places where internet bandwidth is not super high, connections get bandwidth limited at high usage times, making Netflix downgrade the quality automatically to prevent buffering.

You can experience this yourself if you visit a South American mid-size city and view Netflix in the nighttime.

Netflix on 1080P is rather atrocious, especially movies and shows with a lot of darker content in the images, the packing gets very rough. Also, on Android it will always look very pixelated on maxi quality.

Pages can do whatever, it's not like I really notice if it loads in 1 or 10 ms.

But torrents definitely are capable of using the whole connection, as well as any downloads from Microsoft servers and many local Linux distro mirrors, Docker Hub etc. That's when I truly feel love for my 1 Gbps, cuts waiting in 1/10.

The population of client devices that can use 802.11ax "6e" in bands above 5850 MHz is very tiny so far, it will take years to even become a thing. If people want their wifi AP to be backwards compatible with any client devices made before 2022 they'll need to run the center of the channel at a frequency 802.11n and later (but not >6GHz capable) devices can see and use.

Neat, maybe it'll let me get gigabit wifi speeds in reality when not right on top of the AP.

Nope. Your whatever device is probably limited by the hardware it has and could never theoretically get that speed no matter how close it is.

Even WiFi routers advertise their maximum "capacity" as someone noted in another comment, which refers to the bandwidth they can support when multiple devices are connecting at the same time (and they usually add up their 2.4GHz performance to the 5.0GHz performance, so you'd have to be having devices of both types to achieve the maximum advertised).

And only then you start worrying about how close you are :)

If they're claiming 40gbps from 16x16, that means that a 2x2 or 3x3 wifi 7 device should be able to easily exceed 1gbps of real throughput.

You don't need WiFi 7 for that, a totally reasonable WiFi 5 setup can achieve the same.

One of the odd things I noticed on my home LAN is that with good devices all around, real-world wifi speeds are now faster than wired speeds.

Wired is still more reliable, and consistency at high speed is more important than super-high-speed, but at least average throughput is a lot higher on wifi.

Our of curiosity, what would we define Wi-Fi 8 as?

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