1 IT’S RIGHT ON SCHEDULE
If you’re not ready for Wi-Fi 7, that’s understandable. Most of us haven’t caught up with Wi-Fi 6E yet, which only hit the mainstream around 18 months ago.
Strictly speaking, though, Wi-Fi 6E wasn’t a new standard. While it introduced support for wireless networking in the 6GHz frequency range, it’s otherwise based on exactly the same 802.11ax specification as Wi-Fi 6. It could justifiably have been called Wi-Fi 6.1.
So really it’s getting on for four years since the last major Wi-Fi update – and when you look back over previous releases, that’s about par for the course. From the original 802.11b release in 1999 onwards, each generation of the technology has reigned for between four and six years, before being replaced by something smarter and faster. Wi-Fi 6 was adopted in 2019 and Wi-Fi 7 is due to be finalised in 2024, so it fits the pattern perfectly.
That doesn’t mean you’ll necessarily have to wait until next year to move up to Wi-Fi 7. The core features and technologies are already firmly defined, allowing manufacturers to build and release Wi-Fi
