8 points

This is the best summary I could come up with:


One of the biggest benefits of Wi-Fi 7 is that it allows for one device to connect to your router on multiple bands — a feature called Multi-Link Operation — which gives your laptop options when it comes to where to funnel its packets.

But some of the earliest are, at least for now, very expensive: the 16-inch Razer Blade 16 starts at $3,000, and the 18-inch MSI Titan 18 HX A14V costs at least $5,000.

If you’re not in the mood to dump your life savings into a laptop, some more affordable gaming models with Wi-Fi 7 were announced, too.

The one big exception at the show to the unspoken Wi-Fi 7 gaming laptop rule appeared to be Asus.

None of the laptops that the company announced in its ROG lineup, including the Zephyrus line, have Wi-Fi 7 listed in their specs.

If you’re looking to upgrade your gaming laptop and you’re not the type to insist on a wired connection, now is a fine time to start looking at Wi-Fi 7 routers.


The original article contains 552 words, the summary contains 174 words. Saved 68%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

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27 points
*

It feels like the rollout of client modules and APs/routers was better synchronized this time. Back with wifi 6 I ordered the Intel modules within a week of them being available on AliExpress and then waited for what felt like months for APs to be available (it looks like unifi’s wifi 6 ap finally came out in November 2021 based on when I bought it). Unifi’s U7 pro dropped a few days ago so I nabbed one as soon as I saw the email and that arrived today so that’s already set up, and the wifi 7 modules have already been out for a bit, i just didn’t order them since I was anticipating a wait for APs. So now I just gotta wait a bit for shipping and I’ll have all my laptops upgraded too.

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as a poor pc gamer runnin a 6700k i will see yall soon because this thing is getting crusty

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7 points

My gaming PC doesn’t even have wifi, I just ran a cable. I wire everything I can, even my Chromecast using USB otg adapters. The less stuff that’s on the WiFi, the less crappy of an experience the stuff that’s left will have. Also I’m just about there with you, my non-work laptop is an almost 6 year old XPS 15 with a 7700k, but I swapped the wifi chip for an ax200ngw wifi 6 one for $15.

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3 points

On the cable point, the more interesting network advancement is 2.5GbE finally becoming wildly available, with switches, USB dongles, pci-e cards, and routers finally using them, and for prices that are only marginally more expensive then gigabit. And cheap enough that even used SFP+ gear looks expensive enough to not be worth the hassle, particularly as they can eat power in various ways.

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14 points

I literally just installed my unifi wifi6 pro a coupl weeks ago. …I had no idea WiFi 7 was just around the corner.

That said, non of my devices support that as far as I know so I am not going to be missing out for a while I don’t think.

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4 points

It won’t be worth it for a hot minute. There are only a few routers on the market and they range from several hundred to a couple thousand.

And there are even fewer devices that support it. There are a couple laptops that support it, but they’re a few thousand dollars.

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4 points

Sounds like the usual introduction for a new wifi protocol. It’s a niche market until enough devices become compatible. Then a rapid adoption as things reach their normal end-of-life and are replaced.

So wifi 7 will be widely adopted in 5-7 years if it proves stable.

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2 points

I wish I knew how long a hot minute was.

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1 point

I think it’s how long a minute would feel if your head was on fire for the duration.

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1 point

You can upgrade any laptop with socketed m.2 wireless to wifi 7 for ~$20

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1 point

Haha, you and me both. At least it probably won’t matter for a few years.

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89 points

I guess one reason why no one is paying attention to it is because is the Wi-Fi speed usually the limiting factor? In my case I’ve rarely ever maxed out my Wi-Fi 6 speeds. Typically the host or the network that I’m on that is the limiting factor.

Although I’m also in the US so I know where not know for having the fastest internet in the world. Maybe in other areas of the world WiFi 7 might be more useful.

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11 points

I’m more excited about reducing congestion when more of my neighbors upgrade to 6, so that BSS coloring and other wifi 6/7 features can enable more efficient use of the spectrum. Before wifi 6 most of the upgrades were just increasing data rates, but really lacking in improvements to spectral use efficiency (like the resource unit allocation in OFDMA which splits channels into sub carriers and centrally plans assignment to multiple client devices for simultaneous use which results in much less wasted airtime compared to each device yelling and listening while waiting to see if they can have exclusive access to the whole channel which wastes time) and interference management (like preamble puncturing which allows partial use of a channel when only a portion has interference). In a crowded environment like an apartment building wifi 6 should help a lot in reducing channel utilization.

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28 points

Canada, one of our primary ISPs offers fibre to the home with speeds of 1Gbit and even higher. So many threads on their forums with users confused why they can’t get anywhere close to 1Gbit and it always turns out to be WiFi.

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14 points

I can get very close to 1 Gbit on Ethernet but top out at maybe 400 Mbps on wifi.

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9 points

Exactly, wifi 7 will probably get us to or close to practical 1Gbit wireless speed vs theoretical 1Gbit speeds.

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20 points

This is very useful in places like big city where there are gazillion of devices fighting for airtime. Wifi 7 devices can dynamically switch channel, or even use multiple channels at once which should help a lot in congested environment.

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0 points
Deleted by creator
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9 points

I have one WiFi 6 access point and unless I’m running a benchmark while right next to it, I can’t tell the difference between it and the WiFi 5 access points. I doubt WiFi 7 will make much difference unless you are running 320MHz channels. There’s only enough bandwidth for 3 of them, so good luck getting decent performance unless you live out in the country though.

High speeds are helpful for anyone that has network storage and doesn’t want to plug in an ethernet cable. It doesn’t have anything to do with how fast your internet is.

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1 point

They’re is so much wrong here I don’t know where to start.

  1. get a better wifi 6ap. You should be getting about 2x the bandwidth. I get about 900mbps on my 5 year old cell phone sitting on the couch.

  2. Wi-Fi 7 smaller width channels to avoid interference. Pretty much everything you’ve said here is backwards/wrong and i encourage you to do some learning on your own.

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4 points

I’m using a Unifi U6-Lite access point and an Intel AX210 WiFi card on an 80MHz channel. Iperf showed about 600mbps down on WiFi 6 and 550 on WiFi 5 from across the room last time I tested it. There’s no other WiFi networks anywhere near me to interfere with anything.

Smaller channels will avoid interference, but you get less bandwidth on them. The bitrate only increased 20% between WiFi 6 and 7. To get a large speed boost, you need the wider channels that WiFi 7 supports.

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3 points

Also the fact that the faster the wifi, the easier it is to block.

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8 points
*

I guess one reason why no one is paying attention to it is because is the Wi-Fi speed usually the limiting factor?

On a LAN? Pretty easily if you have a gigabit or greater network. Wi-Fi 6 can do close to gigabit but not consistently and needs to be close to an AP, and it’s unlikely a bunch of devices using it at the same time will be able to do maintain that peak. Maybe 6E, although I don’t have any devices myself that support it.

And WAN speeds of gigabit and greater have become more common, too.

And this ignores the improvements in latency with Wi-Fi 7, which is definitely an issue with traditional Wi-Fi.

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1 point

Ok, I know why we changed the version naming scheme: a, b, g, n, ac, ax… It was a nightmare, just awful.

But I’ll bet it does still have a IEEE designation, so how does 6 or 7 map to the previous scheme? Also, what’s new, what are the impressive current speeds and features?

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3 points

WiFi 7 = 802.11be, FYI

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1 point

5 is AC, 6 is AX

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2 points

These new standards aren’t really targeting residential use so just people shouldn’t care.

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17 points

Where has it taken off ? Only a handful of routers are out for it and they are stupidly expensive. Are there even devices that can utilize wifi 7 ?

Maybe a flagship here and there and a high gaming computer

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