What is the Wi-Fi 7?

The latest and greatest wireless technology is now Wi-Fi 7, this is the 802.11be standard and is the most recent iteration of Wi-Fi, as certified by the Wi-Fi Alliance. The most prominent feature of the 802.11be current standard, is that it is capable of a theoretic maximum speed of 46Gbps. When compared to the speed of Wi-Fi 5, which has a maximum speed of 3.5Gbps (More realistically it typically achieves 200Mbps, depending on the antennas, frequency at which you connect and channels), the highest speeds would only be achievable on the 5Ghz frequency. It is important to also state that Wi-Fi 7 increases the number of special steams from 8 (comparing to Wi-Fi 5) up to 16.

What is the Wi-Fi 6?

One of the most recent, but not the latest Wireless Technology is Wi-Fi 6 this is the 802.11ax standard. In comparison, the theoretical maximum speed of 9.6Gbps. Wi-Fi 6 also supports more “streams” of connectivity. Compared to an older Wi-Fi 5 model router which has a limit of 8 streams across a dual band configuration, a Wi-Fi 6 router has 12 streams across both 2.4 and 5Ghz frequencies.

Streams

The data connection between a router and a device is called a stream, with more streams meaning more speed. The 802.11ax standard supports much quicker streams in comparison to 802.11ac, with a single stream being 1.2Gbps alone, rising to 2.4Gbps and 4.8Gbps for 2 and 3 streams respectively. To achieve the maximum speed, the client device will need to be able to utilise as many streams as the router has.

Overall comparison between Wi-fi 5, 6, 7.

Overall Wi-Fi 5 is still largely in use by many consumer router hardware models and will still provide plenty enough speed for your general day to day user. Wi-Fi 6 is a really positive step up from this and allows for much faster transfer speeds, with the newer broadband products on the market increasing user’s internet speeds over the maximum transmissible power of Wi-Fi 5, therefore causing a bottleneck for users. Many users of FTTP related products specifically will see the benefit of Wi-Fi 6 wireless as they will be able to take full advantage of their new internet speeds over their Wi-Fi connection and not just via an ethernet cable. Wi-Fi 6 and more so Wi-Fi 7 allow for much further throughput in a single stream, therefore, (especially Wi-Fi 7 if you have the higher capacity switching backbone on your network) you will be able to move data on your local network at much faster rates between your devices on your network.