We'll get you that Wi-Fi 7 laptop by 2024, Intel says Intel said it intends to add Wi-Fi 7 hardware to laptops and other PCs "by 2024", and a year later for the rest of the market. That's according to the x86 giant's Eric McLaughlin, veep of its wireless solutions and client computing group, who just the other day gave a briefing on the state of wireless connectivity. McLaughlin …
There are already enough practical problems with wifi that we don't need to worry about the maximum potential speed. Contention and real world barriers (walls) make a mockery of the speed claims and then there's the rest: I can't use auto channel for 5 GHz because I'm close to an airport and channels routinely get shut down and my Macs won't reconnect (I'm holding it wrong says Apple and refuses to accept there could be a bug in MacOS). Contention in the 2.4 Ghz band, and I'm in a fairly residential setting without many other networks locally, leads to frequent reconfiguration and my Raspberry Pi with LibreElec also can't reconnect…
Wifi is great when it works but otherwise use cables whenever you can.
As Charlie has said.
I get it you want to promote faster speeds. But you'll not achieve them. The chances of having a free 320Mhz channel are practically zero.
What can it achieve with a 20Mhz channel (or lower) and/or with many people connecting? If everyone is connecting at 5.8Gbps let alone the 40 that is theoretically mentioned. Just think of the back-haul needed let alone if those speeds are actually achievable with more than 1 person connected.
A lot of people not in IT I speak to think the Wi-Fi speed is the internet speed so that'll be interesting trying to explain why they can't get that speed.
>Contention and real world barriers (walls) make a mockery of the speed claims and then there's the rest:
No need to look outside of the laptop for the mocker's on the speed claims. In my experience the "typical" modern laptop (with Intel WiFi adaptor) has a single 2.4Ghz antenna and a single 5Ghz antenna.
I presume a WiFi7 laptop will require at least 3 antennae (2.4, 5 and 6GHz),; can't see vendors being in a rush to create the space necessary for more.
Ethernet is not dead, how many users need anything faster than what Cat5E and existing network infrastructure can provide, or that business will not want to invest in new network hardware to support fast Wi-Fi, yes less cabling to maintain, as backhaul is from AP's rather than hundreds of floor ports. ?
>yes less cabling to maintain, as backhaul is from AP's rather than hundreds of floor ports. ?
I thought that until I ungraded a client from 26 year old wall wart Cat5e and noddy WiFi to full site-wide WiFi capable of supporting lots of WiFi devices (think ipads and laptops running Zoom et al.) and discovered to fully support their flexible office space requirements and fixed devices we still needed a large number of wall warts...
I want fast and reliable, but if I had to choose, I would choose reliable.
I want more channels and them being separated so les collisions happen and we can have more devices running without issues.
I am not convinced we are going the right way.. wider bands used for less devices to go faster sounds good until you realise you didn't really need the speed for a single device, but rather quite a few devices cooperating and going at good speed.
...assumes:
1) That you can find somewhere with WiFi 7 to connect to.
2) That wherever that is also has a connection to the wider world that handles its WiFi 7 clients running at full chat.
3) And it hasn't got so many things connected to it that you'll actually get a small timeslice of the bandwidth.
4) And its not surrounded by other WiFi 7 connections, so it can only use somewhere around a quarter of the channels required for full speed.
Fat Bloody Chance.
The speed of the physical connection to the big fat internet pipes will be the biggest restriction to the widespread adoption of WiFi 7 for many of out in the real world.
I get 76Mbits download at the moment. FTTH is not going to be available for my address until 2024 even though the fibre was laid in 2021. Then there is upgrading all your home/business infrastructure.
With a recession looming + inflation and a huge dollop of uncertainty, that ain't gonna happen anytime soon even if the routers/hubs/etc were readily available and cheap... no make that very cheap. Money is going to get very tight but the 'C' level execs at places like Intel etc don't care. As long as their new yacht is delivered on time they don't give a damm about the real world.
For most of us... we simply don't care that much any longer about speeds as long as we can get a reliable connection. Unless you are a gamer or a High Frequency Trader the odd millisecond or three simply does not matter in the grand scheme of things.
Once you get on Apple's M1 or M2, you realise that Intel is a legacy company. They could easily repackage their CPUs as heaters or build devices for stress testing of fans.
I can imagine the WiFi 7 transfer speed would melt the Intel laptop and fans would fly away spinning and beheading anyone in their way.
As others have said, speed isn't the issue.
Speed is not what it stopping us from moving (almost) everything to Wi-Fi. It's the fact that on any given day we can have a room with 10 identical laptops in, with an AP in the room, that only 8 of them will connect to.
We are running out of networking professionals who say that everything is set up and configured correctly and that it is just that wi-fi, is at times, just a bit shit. But you try explaining that to the users.....
Yeah, the patch panels in out comms cupboards resemble the Bayeux Tapestry, but I'd rather have that, than just random fluctuations and dead spots, any day.
Or the fun of securely managing the damn thing: certificates instead of passwords, machinery to deploy certificates to phones because doing this by hand is beyond even many professionals, praying that Microsoft doesn't hose the system again by declaring the certificates invalid as happened recently.
This is just standard development as with many things.
As long a Wifi 7 device will contact to earlier versions then I don't think there's much of an issue.
I've got a few devices that were capable of Wifi 6 and when I got around to upgrading my router a few months back those devices benefited from the upgrade. In fact, the jump from 5 to 6 was great enough that I didn't actually need Speedtest to confirm that it had happened.
I would like a bit more concentration on the range rather than speed though. e.g. would it be possible to engineer out Mesh as a solution in more cases.
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