Wi-Fi-7 Technology

The Wi-Fi Standards Evolution

The new generation of Wi-Fi will bring a wealth of improvements for all-new levels of responsiveness and consistency.

For more than 20 years, Wi-Fi technology has helped keep the world connected by meeting the growing needs of a constantly expanding user base. Along the way, Intel has been part of this evolving effort.

Wi-Fi 7 features will expand upon the innovation of Wi-Fi 6 and Wi-Fi 6E to not only enable faster speeds, but dramatically improve responsiveness and reliability for future usages that demand extreme consistency and precision.

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320 MHz Channels & 4K QAM

Wi-Fi 7 enables significantly faster speeds by packing more data into each transmission. 320 MHz channels are twice the size of previous Wi-Fi generations—which is somewhat like using a semi-truck to move boxes, compared to a moving van.

4K QAM (Quadrature Amplitude Modulation) enables each signal to more densely embed greater amounts of data compared to the 1K QAM with Wi-Fi 6/6E, which – to continue the truck analogy-- is like having professional movers optimize truck cargo space to pack the maximum number of boxes.

The benefit for a typical Wi-Fi 7 laptop is a potential maximum data rate of almost 5.8 Gbps. This is 2.4X faster than the 2.4 Gbps possible with Wi-Fi 6/6E and could easily enable high quality 8K video streaming or reduce a massive 15 GB file download to roughly 25 seconds vs. the one minute it would take with the best legacy Wi-Fi technology.

More densely packed cargo

When combined with new 320 MHz channel bandwidths, 4K QAM delivers 2.4X faster speeds than Wi-Fi 6, with PC users experiencing maximum speeds over 5 Gbps.

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MLO & Deterministic Latency

While legacy Wi-Fi provides access to multiple wireless bands, devices typically choose only one band to make transmissions—switching to another if conditions change. With MLO (Multi-Link Operation), Wi-Fi 7 devices can simultaneously connect on two bands. This enables faster speeds through aggregation. Or, both bands can be used concurrently to share redundant/unique data for improved reliability with ultra-low and precise latencies.

To return to the truck analogy: Think of the legacy Wi-Fi device as moving vans that can only take one highway at a time and choose alternate routes if they run into traffic. However, Wi-Fi 7 semi-trucks will simultaneously operate across two highways to get more boxes to the destination more quickly.

Alternatively, identical boxes can be loaded onto trucks on both highways to help ensure at least one of each type arrives at the destination. Lastly, the most important boxes can be loaded onto the truck taking the fastest route—ensuring that the arrival of critical belongings is not impacted by potential delays.

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Multi Resource Units (RU) and Puncturing

With legacy Wi-Fi 6/6E, when any part of a large high-speed channel is being used by another device, the entire channel is unavailable—and a different channel must be used. This is like the legacy Wi-Fi moving van not being able to access a particular multi-lane highway and having to find an alternate route because passenger cars are using one of the lanes.

With Multi-RU Puncturing, Wi-Fi 7 devices will be able to use other parts of the same high-speed channel not in use to enable very large channels (even if they are less than the maximum 320 MHz size.) This would be like the Wi-Fi 7 movers being able to re-pack most of the semi-truck contents into smaller trucks without having to avoid a partially used multi-lane highway so they can deliver boxes to the destination more quickly and reliability.