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Wi-Fi 7 quietly took off while everyone was looking at AI
(www.theverge.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Canada, one of our primary ISPs offers fibre to the home with speeds of 1Gbit and even higher. So many threads on their forums with users confused why they can't get anywhere close to 1Gbit and it always turns out to be WiFi.
I can get very close to 1 Gbit on Ethernet but top out at maybe 400 Mbps on wifi.
Exactly, wifi 7 will probably get us to or close to practical 1Gbit wireless speed vs theoretical 1Gbit speeds.
Wifi 6E already does that, I get about 940 Mbps with my phone on my 6GHz network. That is maybe 10 Mbps less than I get wired.
If you have a non-congested area, 6e is just as fast as 7. 7 just brings a wider channel width and the ability to hop between 6ghz and 5ghz.
I think we are quite a long time from 6E becoming congested. The equpiment is just too expensive right now (nevermind the price of Wifi 7 equipment). In my pretty densely populated area I have zero other 6GHz networks visible from my place.
There were so few 6E devices released, particularly consumer level ones that we can sort of just “skip” it when talking about home user Wifi issues.
I don't think we'll ever hit 6ghz congestion because it just doesn't go very far.
In downtown areas 2.4ghz wifi is basically useless, but 5ghz is still pretty serviceable thanks to it's lower range and more channels. 6ghz is just another 2.4 to 5ghz jump, but now we're getting down to single room levels of range.
I wonder about ping. Will it ever be on par with Ethernet for online gaming?
Single channel WiFi probably is unlikely to get to sub millisecond response timesas it is shared air time for both send and receive of all devices, wifi 7 multi link might help if it can route some traffic on different channels but over all I never expect it to get close to what wired Ethernet can do.
However, for the majority of people (basically exclude professional gaming) below 10ms will be perfectly fine and not noticeable at all, the importance of 6E wasn't it's speed but it's improvement on more consistent connections, if WiFi 7 can improve on this, it's a benefit to gamers and worth upgrading.