Technology

The missing context is that this article is part of their CES coverage. At the expo the huge theme was everyone putting AI in every fucking device they could. A subtler theme that didn't get as much attention was a bunch of new devices launched with Wifi 7 for the first time. So the headline was what was happening at the expo.

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.

This is very useful in places like big city where there are gazillion of devices fighting for airtime. Wifi 7 devices can dynamically switch channel, or even use multiple channels at once which should help a lot in congested environment.

I'm more excited about reducing congestion when more of my neighbors upgrade to 6, so that BSS coloring and other wifi 6/7 features can enable more efficient use of the spectrum. Before wifi 6 most of the upgrades were just increasing data rates, but really lacking in improvements to spectral use efficiency (like the resource unit allocation in OFDMA which splits channels into sub carriers and centrally plans assignment to multiple client devices for simultaneous use which results in much less wasted airtime compared to each device yelling and listening while waiting to see if they can have exclusive access to the whole channel which wastes time) and interference management (like preamble puncturing which allows partial use of a channel when only a portion has interference). In a crowded environment like an apartment building wifi 6 should help a lot in reducing channel utilization.

I have one WiFi 6 access point and unless I'm running a benchmark while right next to it, I can't tell the difference between it and the WiFi 5 access points. I doubt WiFi 7 will make much difference unless you are running 320MHz channels. There's only enough bandwidth for 3 of them, so good luck getting decent performance unless you live out in the country though.

High speeds are helpful for anyone that has network storage and doesn't want to plug in an ethernet cable. It doesn't have anything to do with how fast your internet is.

I guess one reason why no one is paying attention to it is because is the Wi-Fi speed usually the limiting factor?

On a LAN? Pretty easily if you have a gigabit or greater network. Wi-Fi 6 can do close to gigabit but not consistently and needs to be close to an AP, and it's unlikely a bunch of devices using it at the same time will be able to do maintain that peak. Maybe 6E, although I don't have any devices myself that support it.

And WAN speeds of gigabit and greater have become more common, too.

And this ignores the improvements in latency with Wi-Fi 7, which is definitely an issue with traditional Wi-Fi.

No one, because their router probably doesn't support it.

The article is about how new products are getting support for Wifi 7, so probably none of your current devices.

My laptop only supports 2.4 GHz lol

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Why would you use your ISPs router? Mine is set to modem mode an do have my own router which is far better quality and also totally under my control security wise.

Why would you use your isps WiFi router?

I used to scoff at people who would say “just get an access point”, but after looking at too many mesh systems last years with their ridiculous prices, I went with couple of access point and I do not regret it.

Stares at my home networking stack.

Bluetooth has completely different design and goals. When it came out it wanted to do notifications. Nowadays it's been shoehorned into lots of things it wasn't originally supposed to do, like media streaming, controllers, file transfer etc. That's a limit to how far the spec can be twisted.

But this one is one better.

Most don't need faster internet than 50mbits/s either, doesn't mean you won't like having it. A more reliable and faster wi-fi is always welcome.

The biggest benefit to wifi 7 that I'm excited about is streaming wireless VR headsets without extra equipment to a PC.

Sure, it’s already good enough for everything I use it for. However, I hope and expect to be doing cool new shit with way better wifi in 20 years. So, in the chicken and egg problem of technical capability vs cool applications, I am fine with increasing specs way in advance of killer apps.