Technology become Easy just call us
Technology become Easy just call us
22 Feb, 2025
The Wi-Fi 6E successor is here, and it promises to significantly boost the speed and stability of your wireless connections.
While many people only recently upgraded to Wi-Fi 6 or Wi-Fi 6E, the successor to those standards has already arrived. Wi-Fi 7 is the next significant advance, and just like its predecessors, it promises faster connections, lower latency, and the ability to gracefully manage more connections.
If you are looking to improve your Wi-Fi today, Wi-Fi 7 could be the answer. The first wave of Wi-Fi 7 routers was very expensive, but we are starting to see more affordable options, and Wi-Fi 7 is supported by the latest devices, such as Apple's iPhone 16 range. If you need to upgrade pronto, first consider delving into how to buy a router before you check out our picks of the best Wi-Fi routers and the best mesh Wi-Fi systems.
Updated September 2024: We refreshed this guide to reflect the wider rollout of Wi-Fi 7 and the latest Wi-Fi 7 devices, mesh systems, and routers.
The seventh generation of Wi-Fi brings major improvements over Wi-Fi 6 and 6E and can offer speeds up to four times faster. It also includes clever advances to reduce latency, increase capacity, and boost stability and efficiency.
Wi-Fi 7 is IEEE 802.11be in the old naming convention, where Wi-Fi 6 was IEEE 802.11ax, and Wi-Fi 5 was IEEE 802.11ac. Like previous standards, Wi-Fi 7 is backward compatible. But to take advantage of the new features and improved performance it promises, you will need to upgrade your devices. That means buying new routers and access points, not to mention new smartphones, laptops, TVs, and so on.
Wi-Fi 7 is faster, supports more connections, and is more adaptive to maintain reliable low-latency performance.
These benefits help deliver high-quality video and better cloud gaming, and they serve AR and VR applications that require high throughput and low latency. Wi-Fi 7 also tackles congestion and interference, bringing tangible benefits to areas with densely packed devices or neighboring networks that overlap. The latter is most significant for enterprise and larger venues.
You may, understandably, wonder what distinguishes Wi-Fi 7 from Wi-Fi 6E, which broadly promises the same advantages over previous standards by opening up the 6-GHz band. Especially since Wi-Fi 7 will use the same three 2.4-GHz, 5-GHz, and 6-GHz bands. Here are some notable upgrades:
Each band is broken into channels. The 2.4-GHz band comprises 11 channels of 20 megahertz (MHz) each. The 5-GHz band has 45 channels, but instead of being limited to a width of 20 MHz, they can combine to create 40-MHz or 80-MHz channels. The 6-GHz band supports 60 channels, and with Wi-Fi 6E they can be as wide as 160 MHz. Wi-Fi 7 supports channels that are up to 320 MHz wide. The wider the channel, the more data it can transmit.
A simple analogy is to imagine how much traffic a single-lane road can handle compared to a three-lane highway or a six-lane superhighway.
Perhaps the most exciting advance in Wi-Fi 7 is Multi-Link Operation (MLO). Every previous Wi-Fi standard establishes a connection between two devices on a single band. Even a tri-band Wi-Fi 6E router connects two devices on a single band on a fixed channel (the router decides whether to connect on the 2.4-GHz, 5-GHz, or 6-GHz band).
MLO can combine several frequencies across bands into a single connection. A Wi-Fi 7 router can connect to a Wi-Fi 7 device across two or more channels in different bands simultaneously. MLO potentially enables wider channels capable of transmitting more data—going back to our highway analogy, you can send traffic on the highway and the superhighway at once.
