f 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 I mainstream around 2020 while we were distracted by other issues. 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 the same 802.11ax spec as Wi-Fi 6. It could have been called Wi-Fi 6.1.
So it’s getting on for four years since the last major Wi-Fi update – which is about par for the course. From the original 802.11b release in 1999 onwards, each generation 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 7 hardware well ahead of the final sign-off. Indeed, as we’ll discuss, you can already buy a handful of Wi-Fi 7 devices.
That’s how it goes in the world of Wi-Fi: 802.11n and 802.11ac routers were widely available long before the standards had been finalised. Indeed, while Wi-Fi 6 was released in 2019, the standard wasn’t fully signed off until February 2021 – 16 months after we’d tried our first Wi-Fi 6 router, the Asus RT-AX88U.
QAM jam
Wi-Fi 7 uses the same OFDMA technology as Wi-Fi 6, which divides
