Driving speed, stability, and next-gen wireless efficiency

Built on multi-link architecture, expanded spectrum, and higher-order modulation, Wi-Fi 7 lays the foundation for the next phase of immersive and connected living.

- BY PRATIMA HARIGUNANI

The Faster Horse Fallacy has haunted the world of technology since the beginning.

A car was often construed as a faster horse and compared through the same narrow lens. Yet every genuinely new technology is built very differently in terms of infrastructure, workings, possibilities, and costs than the incumbent it replaces.

Would WiFi 7—the latest standard from the WiFi Alliance that started showing its tread marks since 2024—also require a fresh vocabulary? After all, roads, fuel, combustion engines, and wheels have little in common with the stables, hay, stirrups, and reins that defined their predecessors.

Wi-Fi 7 BEYOND A NEW NUMERICAL LABEL

To begin with, Wi-Fi 7—based on IEEE 802.11be—is several leaps ahead of earlier generations. It clocks theoretical speeds of up to 46 Gbps (compared with 9.6 Gbps in Wi-Fi 6) and unlocks Multi-Link Operation (MLO), the feature that truly distinguishes this generation. MLO allows devices to combine multiple bands (2.4, 5, and 6 GHz) for significantly improved speed and reliability.

Its on-paper technology stack is equally impressive: 4096-QAM OFDMA modulation, 16x16 Multi-User, Multiple-Input, Multiple-Output (MU-MIMO), and multi-stream support. Multi-link operation also enables devices to move seamlessly across bands. Users can expect higher speeds, less buffering, and better bandwidth allocation, making it well-suited to latency-sensitive applications such as VR, AR, gaming, and loT.

Crucially, Wi-Fi 7 fully harnesses the 6 GHz band introduced by Wi-Fi 6E. As its formal designation indicates—Extremely High Throughput (EHT)—it is engineered for demanding workloads. Features such as puncturing help isolate interference, ensuring that a small portion of a busy channel does not impede the rest of the channel.