Wi-Fi 7 will bring significant improvements over Wi-Fi 6E. One is in terms of speed. MediaTek plans to unveil Wi-Fi 7 next year, even though Wi-Fi 6 has barely reached consumers. The company confirmed the news this week. It plans to hold the show at CES 2022 (Consumer Electronics Show) in January, which would make it one of the first companies to introduce the new standard. It’s worth noting that Wi-Fi 6 and 6E are still fairly new, so Wi-Fi 7 is a long way from reaching consumers. In addition, the Wi-Fi 7 standard will also greatly reduce latency, which will be helpful for applications where every millisecond counts, such as gaming.
MediaTek confirmed this demonstration during the MediaTek Summit event that took place last Friday. During the event, the company mentioned that Wi-Fi 7 could offer up to 2.4 times the speed of Wi-Fi 6E. James Chen, deputy director of product marketing, said the company is striving to be a leader in this technology. Chen also said that the maximum speed quoted is for the same number of antennas as Wi-Fi 6E. In addition, he said Wi-Fi 7 would more effectively block interference with other neighboring networks.
Although MediaTek plans to demonstrate Wi-Fi 7 next year, a report from the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) indicates it won’t set standards for the technology until 2024. The same report also says that this new technology could reach speeds of up to 40 gigabits per second.
It should be recalled that Qualcomm was already talking about Wi-Fi 7 in 2019, even before Wi-Fi 6 was available. The company’s vice president of the technology claimed that this new technology could achieve higher speeds than wired connections. In addition, Wi-Fi 7 can use the 2.4 GHz, 5 GHz, and 6 GHz bands simultaneously.
Currently, MediaTek has announced that it is working with AMD to bring its own Wi-Fi chips to market. With this, they want to replace Intel’s chips on Ryzen motherboards.