Ookla recently published a research article that documents the implementation of WiFi 7 in the U.S. and around the world. WiFi 7 routers were introduced to the market in early 2024, and Ookla reports that deployment of WiFi 7 routers has already grown to 7.2% in the country. That’s a pretty big uptake in a year and a half, considering that broadband customers generally hang on to WiFi routers unless changing service providers.
It’s not surprising that WiFi is being adopted. WiFi 7 brings a big improvement over WiFi 6 and earlier generations of WiFi. WiFi 7 can theoretically reach much faster speeds, and in practice delivers faster speeds and performance inside the customer premise. Some of the specific benefits include wider data channels inside the home, particularly for customers who have devices that can use 6 GHz spectrum, which is 1,200 MHz of bandwidth between 5.925 GHz and 7.125 GHz. WiFi 7 has better data throughput to devices by the use of 4K-QAM, has better performance from preamble puncturing that can bypass interference, and has faster speeds for specific applications due to multi-link operations that let the router combine multiple frequency bands when needed. WiFi 7 has also doubled the number of simultaneous devices that can be connected from eight to sixteen.
As might be expected, the growing WiFi 7 adoption is mostly coming from ISPs. Charter is currently the biggest user of WiFi 7 in the world. In the U.S., the new technology is being deployed by other large ISPs like Comcast, Frontier, and CenturyLink. It’s likely that the upgrades to WiFi 7 will continue. For years, ISPs have been frustrated by a large percentage of customer complaints about broadband that are actually due to poor customer-provided WiFi modems.
Interestingly, the U.S. is leading the world in WiFi 7 adoption. Part of the reason for this is that China is not stressing the use of WiFi 7 inside the country since the nation has decided to use 6 GHz spectrum for cellular traffic instead of for public WiFi.
The impact of the WiFi 7 routers is dramatic. Ookla cites speed test statistics for Comcast that show that upload speeds have more than doubled for some customers strictly due to the installation of a new WiFi 7 modem.
WiFi technology isn’t sitting still. The first prototypes of WiFi 8 modems should be produced later this year, with commercial production is about two years. WiFi 8 adds even more features that will help the customer experience. The most interesting new feature is Dynamic Sub-band Operations (DSO) that will allow the WiFi router to assign tiny bandwidth channels instead of a full channel when connecting to devices that don’t need much bandwidth. WiFi 8 also has the ability to coordinate with neighboring WiFi routers to cut down on interference. There will be a new technology called Distributed Resource Units and ELR that will improve the upload path to cut down on upload stutters from devices like security cameras and smartphones.
There is even more improvement coming with WiFi 9. The official specifications should be released in early 2027, with commercial adoption likely coming in the early to mid-2030s.
on the residential side we’re still heavy wifi6. However, our wifi6 access points just keep getting better as more consumer devices get wifi6/7. We’re heavy on the Eero6 line. I don’t anticipate having to uplift wifi6 to wifi7.
I know a lot of operations are lagging and still have mostly wifi5. When wifi6 came out, there wasn’t much benefit because client devices just weren’t there, so many didn’t see the benefits of the uplift. Now I think it’s too late for WiFi6 so I would expect a rather rapid adoption of WiFi7 from all those previously lagging services finally running out the hardware cycle.
Wifi7 is really good, but so is WiFi6 when you have wifi6 client devices. I think wifi7 is going to take a lot of credit for wifi improvements but really just having wifi6 plus wifi6+ clients as the majority of connections is making wifi experiences much much better.
I also suspect that the wifi hardware cycles are going to get longer. each iteration was much better in the past, g>n>ac were all big jumps and it really made sense to upgrade. ac>ax is also a big jump ‘when devices also go ax’. ax>be for that typical user is not that big of a jump, technology wise it is but I’m just talking typical users. If you have a solid wifi6 router, wifi7, 8 or 9 is going to be less attractive because what you have is already so good.
From my perspective at a small FTTH ISP, I would gladly deploy wifi 7 CPE, but the costs have been prohibitive the last time I checked. Even in my rural setting, having 6GHz spectrum available would alleviate interference and subscribers’ experience, since to them, wifi IS internet. 2.4GHz is often bad.
Also, I have a hunch that endpoint wifi speeds are one of the main influences on aggregate bandwidth usage for an ISP. In our case, I noticed a jump that seemed to correlate more with the ratio of wifi 5 to wifi 6 devices than to a shift in subscriber usage patterns.
Unfortunately, the chip shortage has driven up the cost of WiFi and other CPE devices.