In my opinion, WiFi standards prior to WiFi were already very mature, high performing and stable. WiFi 6 introduced features like OFDMA and BSS Coloring to increase performance and optimization to wireless networks. WiFi 6E introduced a new 6GHz spectrum which provides 3x more channels compared to 5 GHz (total of 59 x 20 MHz channels in the US) in LPI mode. 6 GHz frequency is going to be able to provide substainal increase in performance and help lower the latency since there will be much less overlapping channels/802.11 interference in majority of the deployments. With already high performing wireless networks, WiFi 7 takes the wireless to the next level with these 3 features -
Multi-Link Operations (MLO)
Think of this feature as Link-Aggregation from the wired world. It allows client (STAs) to connect on multiple bands to the same AP. Just note, a client STA cannot talk to multiple APs at the same time (that is in the Wi-Fi 8 specs).
This is a substantial enhancement as it will be able to provide increased throughput, resiliency and lower latency. Since clients are able to use multiple bands to send and receive data, they will be able to get increased performance overall on their wireless experience. This is also great for critical apps such as in healthcare where MLO can provide steering and resiliency in case one of the radio is experiencing issues.
I feel this is a great enhancement that is a highlight for this standard of WiFi that is going to be able to enable use case for most of the modern application to run on WiFi network.
Preamble Puncturing
This is another excellent feature that is going to allow better spectrum efficiency, especially when you are using bonded channels. Bonded channels allow greater performance in the wireless network due to more bandwidth/spectrum available for the endpoints.
However, you are using a greater slice of the spectrum for a single bonded channel, which also can have a negative impact if the entire bonded channel is occupied or running into other non-802.11 interference, where that channel becomes unavailable for other users.
This feature allows you to carve out a portion of that spectrum so that other devices can use the rest of the available channels. For example, if out of 80 MHz bonded channel, only a 20MHz portion of the spectrum is running into interference, an AP can carve out that 20 MHz spectrum while making the rest of the spectrum available to use by other endpoints.
Enhanced Security
Although security enhancements with WPA3 are not new with WiFi 7, WiFi 7 requires the SSID to run WPA3 enterprise encryption (not WPA3 transition mode) in order to enable 802.11be functionality on the network. Also WPA3 enhancements include encryption even on public wifi networks with the introduction of OWE (Opportunistic wireless encryption). Overall, WPA3 enables stronger encryption that is going to secure traffic transmitted over the air that is going to be much harder to crack in the coming future.
In summary, these are the top 3 features I'm most excited about with the introduction of Wi-Fi 7. I'll also be deep diving into each of these topics in much more details in the coming posts. I hope you have found this post helpful!