Tag Archives: WiFi 7

Broadband Shorts September 2025

The following topics are interesting, just too short of a topic for a full blog.

Criminal Damage to Undersea Fibers. Finland filed criminal charges against the top officers of an oil tanker in connection with damage done to undersea cables in December. The National Prosecution Authority in Helsinki indicted the captain and two first officers of the Eagle S, a Cook Islands-registered tanker that is suspected of being part of a shadow fleet of ships that transports Russian oil in violation of international sanctions. The officers are charged with aggravated criminal mischief for allegedly dragging the ship’s anchor for more than 56 miles across the Gulf of Finland on Christmas Day, cutting five electric and telecom cables and causing almost $70 million in damage. Press releases at the time assumed the damage was accidental.

AT&T Class Action Lawsuits. Millions of AT&T customers are eligible to file claims in the $177 million legal settlement related to two data breaches. The first data breach happened in March 2024 and involved customer data, including date of birth and social security numbers. The second breach in July 2024 exposed calling and text records for nearly all AT&T cellular customers. Multiple lawsuits were filed against AT&T and were consolidated into a single settlement, with $149 million for the first breach and $28 million for the second.

Starlink Introduces Introductory Rates. Starlink has joined the ISP competitive fray and now offers introductory rates to attract new subscribers in rural areas where the company has excess capacity. In affected areas, the introductory rate for monthly broadband is cut from $120 to as low as $85. The company also introduced a new Lite plan for as low as $59 per month for customers with low broadband needs. The plan doesn’t guarantee broadband, and speeds might be deprioritized in times of heavy usage in the area. Starlink has also slashed the price of its receiver in some areas to as low as $89. The discounted rates are only guaranteed for a year, and if customers switch plans or have a service interruption, their rate reverts to the full rates.

Windstream Reunites with Uniti. A decade after the company split into two parts, Windstream and Uniti are reuniting into one company. The original split was unique in the industry and established Uniti as a Reit (Real Estate Investment Trust) that took ownership of the network and leased it back to the telco. The companies are being recombined since the company believes the value of the recombined business will be greater than the value of the two separate companies. The new company will retain the Uniti name and the UNIT stock symbol. The company will keep the Kinetic brand for Windstream fiber customers.

Wi-Fi 7 Adoption at 2%. Ookla reports that one year after introduction, WiFi 7 adoption is just under 2% in the U.S. Nobody expected instant adoption because ISPs need to update customer routers, and customers need to upgrade home devices to be able to use the 6 GHz spectrum being used for WiFi 7. Ookla reports that average speeds with WiFi 7 are almost 400 Mbps faster than the average speeds on Wi-Fi 6E devices and more than 600 Mbps faster than basic Wi-Fi 6. The big advantage of WiFi 7 is the multiple channels available with 6 GHz and the larger size of the channels, which together eliminate contention at a customer site of multiple devices trying to use a small number of channels.

FCC to Bar Chinese Testing Labs. The FCC has begun the process to withdraw the ability of three Chinese labs to certify devices for us in the U.S. The FCC has already withdrawn the testing capability of four other Chinese labs. Many people are not aware that the FCC approves broadband and wireless devices to make sure they meet the claimed specifications. This is particularly important for wireless devices since poorly designed devices can bleed into nearby spectrum bands. In recent years, as many as 75% of devices have been tested and certified in China.

AT&T Accelerating Copper Retirements. The FCC placed a two-year moratorium on notifications related to copper retirement in March and proposed changes to make this permanent. AT&T reacted quickly to the change in regulation and has begun the process of retiring copper in around 500 wire centers, or 10% of the AT&T telco exchanges.

Are You Ready for WiFi 7?

It wasn’t that long ago that we saw a major update to WiFi standards with the release of WiFi 6 in 2019 and WiFi 6E in 2020. But we’re on the verge of the next generation of WiFi with the official launch of the new WiFi 7 standard in November 2022. There has already been a soft release of WiFi 7 routers in China, and we’ll start seeing the new routers in the market here sometime this year.

The performance of WiFi 7 is much improved over its predecessor:

  • A WiFi 7 router will be able to connect to more simultaneous devices, which will be useful in hotels and other public settings.
  • WiFi 7 has vastly improved theoretical speeds. WiFi 6 could support a speed as fast as 9.6 Gbps. WiFi 7 will allow for a connection as fast as 36 Gbps.
  • The new standard will be better able to maintain a low-latency connection to devices.
  • WiFi 7 will allow for WPA4 security, but this part of the standard has not been fully ratified.

The new standard achieves improvement in several ways. First, the new standard can spread a single broadband connection across frequency bands and effectively create wider bandwidth channels. Where WiFi 6 had a maximum channel size of 160 MHz, the new WiFi 7 can create a channel as wide as 320 MHz.

The new WiFi standard will use the three existing WiFi frequencies of 2.4 GHz, 5 GHz, and 6 GHz. The big improvement over WiFi 6 is that WiFi 7 can reach across all three frequencies to create a connection, while WiFi 6 was limited to only use 6 GHz spectrum.

WiFi 7 also introduces a new feature called Multi-Link Operation (MLO) which will allow for the simultaneous sending and receiving of data within one channel – something that’s never been available with WiFi before.

WiFi 7 also has an interesting feature called Multi Resource Unit Puncturing that allows for a router to grab any unused spectrum within channels that are in use. This means that all of the bandwidth in the frequency band is available for use. In current WiFi technology, when a channel is connected to a device, the entire channel is dedicated to that one use, even if the bandwidth use is small.

Interestingly, these features look a lot like the features that are supposed to be used by 5G. It seems WiFi manufacturers have beaten the cellular companies to the market with some of these features that more efficiently use bandwidth.

An immediate use could be in offices where WiFi 7 can allow the transfer of data between devices at 10 Gbps without wires. An office only has to upgrade to WiFi 7 devices when they become available. While this also could mean a big improvement in places like a stadium or a convention center, it will take years until enough users have WiFi 7 capable devices. The ultimate benefit of the larger channel sizes and faster speeds is to enable technologies like ultra-high definition video or augmented reality.

Just like with WiFi 6, we won’t see much WiFi 7 in use until there are both routers and devices enabled to use the routers. Most of the devices in our homes are still not WiFi 6 compatible, and there are still not a huge number of homes with a WiFi 6 router. But over time, new WiFi 7 devices will include the standard and will creep into our homes and businesses.

WiFi 7

The WiFi 6 standard was just approved in 2020 and is starting to find its way into home and business WiFi networks. If you’ve purchased a new WiFi router recently, there is a decent chance that it can support WiFi 6. However, the benefits of the new WiFi aren’t going to benefit a home until you’ve upgraded devices like TVs, computers, and various IoT devices to use the new standard. It’s likely to take years for WiFi 6 to get fully integrated into most homes.

But that hasn’t stopped vendors from already working on the next generation of WiFi technology, naturally being called WiFi 7. WiFi 7 promises faster speeds and lower latency and will be aimed at maximizing video performance. Qualcomm says it expects full WiFi 7 to become available after 2024. WiFi 7 will be using the new WiFi specification 802.11be.

The speed capabilities have climbed with each subsequent generation of WiFi. WiFi 5, which most of you are running in your home today has a maximum speed capability of 3.5 Gbps. WiFi 6 stepped maximum speeds up to 9.6 Gbps. The early specifications for WiFi 7 call for maximum data speeds of 30 Gbps. While most of us will never tax the capabilities of WiFi 5, faster speeds are important because it means a WiFi signal can burst huge amounts of data in a short period of time.

WiFi 7 isn’t going to require additional WiFi spectrum – but more spectrum helps. The federal Court of Appeaks for Washington DC just recently confirmed the FCC’s allocation of 6 GHz spectrum for WiFi use. The NCTA, representing the big cable companies, recently filed a request with the FCC asking the agency to consider opening additional new bands of free public spectrum for WiFi using 7 GHz spectrum and lower 3 GHz spectrum. The trade group argues that WiFi has created the largest public benefit of any spectrum band that FCC has ever authorized. The trade association argues that the world is finally becoming awash in Internet of Things devices, with Charter alone connecting to half a billion IoT devices.

There are two big changes that will differentiate WiFi 7 from WiFi 6. First is a major upgrade to the WiFi upload link. WiFi 7 will incorporate uplink multiuser multiple-input multiple-output (UL MU-MIMO) technology. The new technology creates multiple paths between a router and a WiFi-connected device. Connecting multiple paths to a device will significantly increase the amount of data that can be transmitted in a short period of time. WiFi 6 allows for a theoretical eight simultaneous paths – WiFi 7 increases that to sixteen paths.

WiFi 7 will also bring another improvement labeled as coordinated multiuser MMO (CMU-MIMO). CMU-MIMO will let a home device connect to more than one WiFi router at the same time. Picture your computer connected to several channels from different home routers. This coordination should result in faster connections, lower latency, and the ability to deliver high bandwidth to every corner of a home that is equipped with multiple WiFi access points. This is the most complicated challenge in the WiFi 7 specification.

WiFi 7 promises other improvements as well. The 802.11be specification allows for combining spectrum paths. Today’s WiFi routers use one channel of spectrum for a single device, and the planned upgrade would allow devices to combine signal paths from different WiFi frequencies at the same time. Another slated improvement is an upgrade to allow the use of 4096-QAM. The QAM technology will allow the combination of more than one frequency modulation in the same data path.

The 801.11be specification is pushing the limits of physics in a few places and may never fully achieve everything being promised. But it represents another huge upgrade for WiFi. There are a few vendors that will be previewing early versions of WiFi 7 technology at CES 2022. Maybe most of us will at least have made the transition to WiFi 6 before this latest and greatest WiFi is available.