Laptops meeting the new superfast spec could be available in 2025.
This week, Intel said that computers using its Wi-Fi 7 modules are expected to be available within the next two years, according to a report in Ars Technica.
Eric McLaughlin, VP of the Client Computing Group and GM of the Wireless Solutions Group at Intel, announced the arrival at a recent press conference. “We are currently developing Intel’s Wi-Fi ‘802.11be’ in order to obtain the Wi-Fi Alliance certification, and it will be installed in PC products, such as laptops, by 2024”, he said. “We expect it to appear in major markets in 2025.”
His remarks were reported by South Korean IT news site ETNews and picked up by The Register. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 802.11be standard, also known as Wi-Fi 7, is expected to leverage the 6 GHz band in addition to the 2.4 and 5 GHz bands while delivering a max channel bandwidth of 320 MHz, compared to Wi-Fi 6/6E’s max of 160 MHz.
Wi-Fi 7
Wi-Fi 7 will also increase throughput by up to 20 percent by moving from Wi-Fi 6/6E’s 1,024 quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) to 4,096 QAM while adding multi-link operation (MLO) and multi-resource unit puncturing.
Automated frequency coordination, another new Wi-Fi 7 technology, will let Wi-Fi 7 adjust to 6 GHz frequencies that aren’t in use by nearby electronics like radio telescopes and weather radar, making connections more reliable. Furthermore, multi-link operations will allow devices to connect to many channels at the same time to increase connection speeds, which are theoretically able to reach as high as 40 Gbps.
Currently, Intel expects laptops equipped with its future Wi-Fi 7 technology to support a potential max data rate of 5.76 Gbps if the system supports the 320 MHz channel, 4,096 QAM, and MLO. “Based on an industry-standard assumption of 90 percent efficiency for new Wi-Fi products operating in the exclusive 6GHz band, the resulting estimated maximum over the air 2×2 client speed would be 5.19 Gbps”, Intel’s Wi-Fi 7 page claims.
“Since there is more than a year left before the release of 802.11be, there is still a chance that we could improve the processing speed even further”, McLaughlin said, according to ETNews. Chipmakers Qualcomm and MediaTek have already launched WiFi 7 chipsets.