Wi-Fi Alliance Announces Wi-Fi 7 Certification

Today, the Wi-Fi Alliance announced its awkwardly-named Wi-Fi Certified 7 certification program to speed the adoption of the new wireless standard.

“Wi-Fi 7 will see rapid adoption across a broad ecosystem with more than 233 million devices expected to enter the market in 2024, growing to 2.1 billion devices by 2028,” the group announced. “Smartphones, PCs, tablets, and access points (APs) will be the earliest adopters of Wi-Fi 7, and customer premises equipment and augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR) equipment will continue to gain early market traction. Wi-Fi Certified 7 pushes the boundaries of today’s wireless connectivity, and [it] helps ensure advanced features are deployed in a consistent way to deliver high-quality user experiences.”

Compared to current Wi-Fi standards, Wi-Fi 7 will offer significant improvements to throughput and reliability, lower latency, and reduced power consumption in the 2.4, 5, and 6 GHz bands. It uses 320 MHz superwide channels (where the 6 GHz band has been approved for Wi-Fi), Multi-Link Operation (MLO) load balancing, 4K QAM (quadrature amplitude modulation) transmission rates, and other new technologies to achieve this.

Broadcom, Intel, MediaTek, and Qualcomm are among the first to deliver Wi-Fi Certified 7 devices, the Alliance notes. And their chipsets are powering new PCs, routers, and other devices that are being announced this week at CES, including the HP Spectre x360 14 (2024) that I just reviewed.