Even though Wi-Fi 6 is barely making its way into devices, let alone that WiFi 6E revision
‘extension’, there is already talk about how WiFi 7 will be arriving a bit sooner than expected.
There are already expectations that the next version, WiFi 7, will be released in mid-2024.
Which means that WiFi 7 is shaping up to be the fastest WiFi revision ever. The previous
record was between B and G WiFi way back in 2003, which was 3 years 9 months, and from WiFi 5 to 6,
the latest, we waited over 7 years! So what we’ll be going over today is all the crazy new stuff
that will be in this new version, including the higher speed obviously (which spoiler, it could be
up to 5 times as fast), but also some of the other coolest features that are usually hidden behind
technical mumbo jumbo, but that I’ll explain in a way that anyone can understand. Before we jump in
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in the description below. And so, with that being said, let's continue. Alright so the
first thing you’re wondering is about the speed of Wi-Fi 7. And by using all the extra features
we’ll talk about next, WiFi 7 is expected to be able to handle speeds of up to 46 Gbps! About 5
times as fast as WiFi 6. Now of course that’s the theoretical number that no one ever gets in real
life, but the 5-times figure is also compared to the theoretical max of WiFi 6, so it’s still way
faster. It’s no wonder it’s being assigned the descriptor “EHT” – Extremely High Throughput.
And after explaining the other features, it will become obvious how this is possible. The first big
new feature of WiFi 7 is the addition of an entire new spectrum band, 6 GHz, which is more exciting
than it sounds. Basically up until now, you’ve probably seen most routers touting that they’re
“dual band”, referring to 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz (which by the way is completely different
from 5G). And real quick for the non-experts, being dual-band just means your router can use
two ranges of frequencies to talk to devices, where 2.4 GHz can go further but isn’t as fast,
and 5 GHz which is faster but can’t go as far. The biggest problem with 2.4GHz is that it’s crowded,
because it’s used by TONS of other stuff, even getting interference from microwaves,
and it’s also super small in terms of possible channels, literally only 3,
so if you live in an apartment building, well there’s probably more than 3 routers around,
so they interfere. Now 5 GHz solves a lot of this and is usually way better, which I explained in
my only slightly clickbait video, “Stop Using 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi”. But even 5GHz is not perfect, because
a large majority of those channels are almost never used because they share airspace with Radar,
like from weather stations, which adds a lot of hassle which I’m not going to get into,
they’re called “DFS channels”, can't use them all the time, it's annoying. But, 6 GHz is just built
different. Where 2.4 GHz has just 3 channels, and 5 GHz has 9, not counting the DFS ones,
the 6 GHz band has a whopping 59! Now in some countries, they’re not adopting the full 6 GHz
spectrum, they’re adopting about half of that, but that’s still 24 new channels, and they might
increase it later. Now technically I should point out the new WiFi 6E extension does have 6 GHz,
but that’s even less common than WiFi 6, and by the time it rolls out, WiFi 7 will be around
and have it all built in. So why should you care about 6GHz? Well all this space has a big benefit
beyond just less interference from neighbors, which is you can combine channels to effectively
multiply your speed, it’s called Channel Bonding. This has already been a thing for a while,
and actually, most 5GHz routers by default use 40MHz wide channels, which is double the smallest
possible size. So again, that means 5GHz only has 3 truly usable default channels, sort of similar
to the problem 2.4 GHz has. Anyway, the upgrade here is that while WiFi 6 supported up to 160 MHz
wide channels, which was 8 channels combined, WiFi 7 will support up to a whopping 320 MHz
of combined channels. So that’s one of the reasons why it is capable of such higher speeds, but it’s
not the only reason, which we’ll get to later. Alright, now the next feature is pretty huge,
which is something called “Multi-Link Operations”, and again, it’s not as complicated as it sounds.
Basically until now, if you have a dual band router, you can only connect to one of the bands
at a time. Sometimes there will be a separate network name for the 5GHz one, and sometimes the
2.4 and 5 GHz share a name. In that case, it only looks like one network. But behind the scenes,
your phone or device decides which band to connect to, since it can only choose one. However,
Multi-Link Operation simply means being able to connect to multiple bands simultaneously. Not just
combining channels, but multiple bands. So you can connect to not only 2.4 GHz, but also 5 GHz,
and 6 GHz simultaneously, or whichever of the signals are usable at that time. And this can
have several benefits. The first obvious one, is that different data can be sent over all the bands
at once, so you can get way faster speeds. But you can also transmit all the same data
over all three simultaneously for redundancy, therefore greatly increasing the reliability of
the connection. Maybe a few bytes get lost on one band, but they arrive fine by another, so nothing
has to be resent. And perhaps the router and device could automatically start doing this when
all of a sudden, some interference is detected. Or maybe when you’re close
enough to the router to use the faster 5 and 6 GHz, it uses that, but as the signal drops, it
automatically could start using 2.4. That would kind of be like a mesh network, where you have
multiple WiFi access points, and your phone just connects to the closest one as you walk around.
Speaking of ‘mesh networks’, that brings us to the other big improvement, called “Multi Access
Point Coordination”. Which basically just means if you have multiple access points (or routers,
whatever), like a WiFi extender, then the access points will be much better at talking to each
other to give you the best signal. At this point from my understanding, mesh networks are kind of
"dumb", in the sense that a device will just pick one of the multiple access points for a
network to connect to, and pretends the other ones don’t exist, until the signal gets really bad,
then might switch to the other one. But it’s not like one access point can ‘help out’ another,
it’s just all or nothing. But with Wi-Fi 7, the access points will know more about what
other ones are doing. So say one access point "A" is talking to one phone that is far away,
and access point "B" is talking to another that is close to it. But the phones are on opposite sides,
so only one access point can see each phone. What point A can do is tell point B, "hey turn down
your power, you’re interfering with me and your device is close by anyway, mine isn’t, I need
it." And that way they can coordinate to minimize the interference when it's not necessary. Another
use is called “Joint Transmission”, and this means that two access points could agree to broadcast
the same information to one device to improve the signal. So instead of each access point
interfering with each other, they could actually work together. There are other ways access points
can coordinate but I’m not really going to get into them because they are legitimately
complicated, for example access points would be able to broadcast a signal that partially
cancels out the signal coming from another access point, because it knows it’s coming,
so it can cancel out the interference. Which is kind of wild. So there's a ton of awesome new
technology being put into the next WiFi version, and it’s not just a bunch of isolated features,
some of them actually play off each other. I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty excited, and
hopefully we’ll get it as soon as they say. Thanks again to accessiBe for sponsoring this video,
be sure to use the link in the description to book a demo so you can make your website compliant and
accessible to more customers. If you want to keep watching, the next video I’d recommend is where I
was going over three major new developments happening to WiFi, one of which is WiFi 7
which we just talked about, but there are other things coming out separately that are pretty cool,
so you can just click that right there. So thanks for watching, and I’ll see you in the next one.