Most flagship smartphones today ship with the Wi-Fi 6 standard, aka IEEE 802.11ax. Technically, it isn’t the latest Wi-Fi standard as we also have the newer Wi-Fi 6E around. However, the latter doesn’t bring many improvements over the former. The peak theoretical speed is still 9.6Gbps. What Wi-Fi 6E essentially does is adds a third 6GHz band. This makes your network less congested, enabling consistent speed for all connected devices. This particularly helps large networks. However, the improvement isn’t substantial and hence, Wi-Fi 6E is seen as a transitional step towards Wi-Fi 7, aka IEEE 802.11be. Wi-Fi 7 will also be a tri0band system with data transmission over 2.4GHz, 5GHz, and 6GHz spectrum bands. But we are in for a major speed boost with the next-gen solution. The Wi-Fi Alliance, the worldwide network of companies that brings you Wi-Fi, is claiming speeds higher than 30Gbps. For reference, the dual-band (2.4GHz and 5GHz) Wi-Fi 5 system offers a peak theoretical speed of 6.9Gbps. The speed boost that you’ll get with Wi-Fi 7 is massive. On top of that, the new Wi-Fi standard can leverage the much wider 320Mhz channels and 4K quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) technology. You get up to 16 spatial streams with improved MIMO (Multiple Input Multiple Output). Wi-Fi 7 also supports MLO (Multi-link Operation), enabling simultaneous transmission of signals through multiple radio bands and channel frequencies for reduced latency. The Wi-Fi Alliance further states Wi-Fi 7 focuses on physical (PHY) and medium access control (MAC) improvements. All these improvements will ensure seamless wireless connectivity for demanding applications such as AR/VR, 8K video streaming, and cloud computing and gaming.
Samsung may be one of the firsts brands to launch Wi-Fi 7 smartphones
Semiconductor companies such as Qualcomm, MediaTek, Broadcom, and Intel have all showcased their respective Wi-Fi 7 solutions in recent months. All major wireless device makers would be looking to adopt one of these solutions once the new Wi-Fi standard is official. Samsung has always been one of the leading brands in this race and things likely won’t change in the case of Wi-Fi 7 as well. The Galaxy S24 series could be among the first batch of smartphones to support next-gen Wi-Fi. Stay tuned for more information on the Wi-Fi 7 technology.
