WiFi 7 is officially here, but routers are pricey. Do you need it yet

https://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/tech/article/switch-to-wifi-7-from-wifi-6-18612832.php?sid=5b0231962ddf9c12eaeac904&ss=A&st_rid=ba565903-0389-4060-a5c2-560760d46479&utm_source=marketing&utm_medium=copy-url-link&utm_term=&utm_campaign=article-share&hash=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuaG91c3RvbmNocm9uaWNsZS5jb20vYnVzaW5lc3MvdGVjaC9hcnRpY2xlL3N3aXRjaC10by13aWZpLTctZnJvbS13aWZpLTYtMTg2MTI4MzIucGhw&time=MTcwNTkyNjE5MjY3MA%3D%3D&rid=YmE1NjU5MDMtMDM4OS00MDYwLWE1YzItNTYwNzYwZDQ2NDc5&sharecount=Mw%3D%3D

by ohjeez • 2 years ago

31 101 2 years ago

houstonchronicle.com

FirmwareBurner5• 2 years ago

I'm not yet making use of wifi 6 or 6E, let alone needing wifi 7, when my ISP fiber speed at home is only 300Mbps so even the old wifi 5 AC currently in use is sufficient for my household with its 866 Mbps theoretical top speed.

I could in theory install it at my parents place where they have multi gigabit fiber internet available, but there's only so fast you need to beam cat videos to your iPad before you reach diminishing returns and I feel like we crossed that point a while ago.

Wifi 7 feels just like mm-wave 5G and 8k TVs, as in there's legit use cases it for them, but for 90% of people it's overkill compared to the previous-gen they already have, and all the hype in the media is basically advertising to drive consumer interest and sales for something they most likely don't need.

treesciencebot• 2 years ago

with MLO and the promised latency decreases, even at 300Mbps, it should significantly make a difference on how "snappy" everything is (and how reliable video calls are).

FirmwareBurner5• 2 years ago

That sounds nice I guess, but since I'm not a professional twitch streamer or cam-girl, I doubt that one improvement will change my life.

slau• 2 years ago

5G marketing always made me smile. “It will allow doctors to operate on a patient on the other side of the planet”. How? “It will enable next gen VR content”. How?

If WiFi + fibre can’t do that, how on earth is 5G supposed to do that? Even if 5G was supposed to replace WiFi (it didn’t), you’re still stuck with the same fibre in between the two 5G masts.

geraldhh• 2 years ago

telemedicine and vr are held high for new infotech since i can remember.

probably because those usecases are generic, futuristic and useless, so they can be employed again and again.

dataengineer562• 2 years ago

There's a British TV advert for a mobile phone network where Kevin Bacon helps a family to land a plane from their living room using a 5G dongle.

https://www.campaignlive.co.uk/article/ee-lands-plane-family...

coder5436• 2 years ago

I have never seen a WiFi 5 device benchmark anywhere close to 866Mbps in real world scenarios.

Most of the time, you're lucky to reach half of the "theoretical" numbers for WiFi due to the way that they're calculated. I would almost be amazed if you could consistently max out your 300Mbps internet connection over WiFi 5, but that's probably just within reach of WiFi 5, assuming there isn't much interference for WiFi 5 to handle.

EDIT: I checked on my old iPhone SE (1st gen), which is a WiFi 5 client device, and it was only able to achieve ~240Mbps down on the best run. Are you sure you're not bottlenecked by WiFi 5?

bradfa4• 2 years ago

My iPhone SE 3rd gen is bottlenecked by my 500Mb fiber line in speed tests within my office room where the wifi AP is located. My AP is only a wifi 5 device.

vetinari6• 2 years ago

When I used the Macbook Pro (13", 2015) with Turris Omnia, my jaws dropped. I was getting gigabite over wifi. No wonder that the mbp had no ethernet.

It turned out, that Apple at the time used 3x3 MIMO ac and Turris happened to also be one.

With more common setup (2x2 mimo, 80 mhz wide channel), it is not a problem to achieve near 800 mbps speed with wifi5. 300 Mhz is too low; that must be either very noisy environment, or misconfigured AP (no mimo, narrow channel).

thomastjeffery2• 2 years ago

It depends on how new/expensive your router is, how strong the signal is/close you are, and how congested the channel is (at that moment). Some Wifi 5 (802.11ac) routers are significantly faster than the average.

Brajeshwar2• 2 years ago

The fantastic article, Wireless is a trap[1], is one the best resource and will likely be valid for quite a pretty long time that -- yes, Wi-Fi is cool and all -- but you it will still lag behind wires.

The article was also discussed over and over again;

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23589798

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31358855

1. https://www.benkuhn.net/wireless/

vanilla_nut• 2 years ago

Worse, ultrawideband/mmwave 5G and 8k TVs can be a nuisance. I've seen 5G phones repeatedly get "stuck" on a weak or nonexistent mmwave signal while traveling, and it can take quite some time before the phone decides to fall back to a different tower. 8k TVs are cool until you realize that a lot of your cables won't even output 4k signal to them, if the manufacturer didn't implement a decent fallback.

I'm not sure if wifi 7 has similar hangups, but considering the fact that my 10 year old Airport router still does everything I need at home, with an integrated backup for my Macs, it's a hard sell. I still get reduced bufferbloat on the Airport Extreme compared to most commercial routers -- I'm guessing that even when you just use one, modern mesh network configs have some nasty overhead.

thomastjeffery2• 2 years ago

The worst thing about TV input is usually refresh rate. Many TVs will display 120hz internally, but their HDMI port will only carry 4K@60. Because of this, the only way to see 120fps video is by playing 60fps (or less) video through the TV's internal GPU-based frame interpolation.

If TV manufacturers would have just put in a DisplayPort port, we wouldn't be in this mess.

gumby• 2 years ago

There aren't any 6 clients in our house yet, much less 6E. 7 can wait.

bluGill2• 2 years ago

I'm still on 5, but I keep meaning to get something for my shed. If I ever do this I'll buy the latest for the places I spend most of my time and moving an old AP to the shed. It might be Wifi8 by the time I get a round toit though.

Brajeshwar2• 2 years ago

I believe, not yet for quite a while.

I moved mostly to wired during the Pandemic and the wi-fi is just there for the ones that needs it. Recently, I saw Crosstalk Solutions video[1] about Wi-Fi 7 with the new Unifi Access Point and he makes some good point about Wi-Fi 7 not something almost all of us don't need yet -- for quite a while.

And from my cursory readings, this is still not going to be easy for the Indian Homes (Apartments) where we have pretty thick concrete walls that blocks the 5GHz bands very successfully.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7JNXghzzaZc

paxys2• 2 years ago

It's rare to have multi-gigabit internet at one's home.

Basically no device out there supports WiFi 7.

Getting a WiFi 7 router for "future proofing" also makes no sense considering they cost $500+ right now and the price will come down by a lot.

TL;DR – no, you do not need it.

coder5436• 2 years ago

The UniFi U7 Pro that I bought was ~$200. For that money, it upgraded my network from WiFi 6 to WiFi 7, so now the 6E devices that I have are noticeably faster (since I didn't have 6E before), and my network is future-proofed for WiFi 7. It seemed like an easy win for me, so I disagree with your assessment.

You also don't need multi-gigabit internet to have a NAS that you want to connect to over the local network.

paxys2• 2 years ago

You can get 6E router for <$100. Sure future proofing may be a valid argument in some cases, but the vast majority of users simply do not need to spend that extra money.

devrand• 2 years ago

Ubiquiti did come out with their U7 Pro which is only $189, which is really not bad considering their AC Pro is $149 and their U6 Pro is $159.

I ended up upgrading since I do now have a couple of Wifi 6E devices and I live in a very dense apartment building. The 6 GHz band has been crazy good! With the same laptop, with line of sight to the AP, I'll get 800 mbps on the 6 GHz band and 250 mbps on the 5 GHz.

zenonu• 2 years ago

I wonder why many don't consider working with a lot of data off of a NAS that could benefit from the cleaner network setup. 6Ghz is also clearly helpful as an early adopter.

WXLCKNO3• 2 years ago

I'm moving into my first house this summer, I'll buy a couple of the new unifi 7 access points since I was just running a dream machine for now.

Paired with 3 gigabit internet I think it makes sense but overall I might as well go for the latest.

bee_rider3• 2 years ago

WiFi is nice for people in apartments but if you own the house, you can just do wired connections.

wongarsu• 2 years ago

Counterpoint: WiFi is nice for people in detached houses, but in apartments the spectrum is so crowded that you really want wired connections.

jeffbee4• 2 years ago

WiFi is substantially faster than wired Ethernet which has stagnated in consumer applications at 1gbps for decades. For example the last time I did a macos migration it chose WiFi despite the wired path being available, and proceeded at greater than gigabit speeds. That's on top of all the convenience.

WXLCKNO3• 2 years ago

Definitely :)

I'm doing major renovations and will be wiring the whole place up. But for the few things that are gonna remain wireless I'll still have the fastest WiFi possible.

Two things I'm most excited about are building an amazing dedicated sound proofed and optimized home theater and having a real centralized server rack for everything in the house. It's gonna be great

velcrovan• 2 years ago

Wifi is also nice for smartphones, tablets, and game consoles. No one is going to “just do wired” with their phone.

smith7018• 2 years ago

I just bought a house that doesn't have wired connections. How hard would it be to update the house to have ethernet? Seems daunting.

emmet4• 2 years ago

Let me know when Wifi gets to the point where I don't need 4 mesh nodes in my 700sqft 180 year old house just to get 50mbps in my bedroom out of my gigabit line at the front of the house.

FredPret• 2 years ago

If it’s 180 y.o., is it built out of brick / stone?

Not an RF expert but maybe you’ll need a totally different radio frequency for that. I would assume all the tech is built around 2.5 - 5 GHz

themerone• 2 years ago

Lathe and Plaster wall construction is not WiFi friendly. It was the dominant interior wall material during the Victorian era until drywall became popular in the 1930s and 40s.

madaxe_again3• 2 years ago

Yeah - I have had this repeatedly as I tend to live in old stone houses with meter thick walls.

I’ve found powerline networking to work surprisingly well - over a hundred megabits on a crufty 70 year old power install, and I just jam them strategically in rooms that are separated by a thick wall.

At home, I throw regular 802.11n half a kilometer through empty air with a yagi, but that’s a different story entirely.

tuckerpo4• 2 years ago

IEEE attempted to fix reliability, range and latency issues in WiFi 6 and 6E. Unfortunately, since the 802.11 spec's conception in the late 90s, the push has been to get throughput numbers (meaning, the marketing number for more sales for vendors) up. I believe WiFi 7 is something like 11 Gbps max theoretical throughput which is a solution in search of a problem. Absolutely nobody needs 11 Gbps, but everyone needs reliability.

vel0city5• 2 years ago

In crowded spaces speed == reliability since a ton of the unreliability is due to crowded channels. More speed == clients shut up faster == more clients are able to actually communicate reliably.

Sure, you might not need 11Gbps on your own. But you + all your neighbors might need a total of 11Gbps. The air is just one big shared wire.

vetinari6• 2 years ago

Wifi is a shared spectrum resource; that 11 gbps is not only for you, but everyone on the same frequency; including other SSIDs.

fmajid5• 2 years ago

The higher 6GHz band penetrates walls less than 2.4GHz and 5GHz, which means you will need more APs but each AP will have less interference from neighbors.

bagels• 2 years ago

My house is larger than this, and my wifi covers my house, my yard, and reaches a few houses away. There's something different about your house, do you have metal in the walls?

madaxe_again3• 2 years ago

The clue is “180 year old” - it’s going to be masonry. I’m willing to bet that yours is framed lumber. The former is like, well, a brick wall, to WiFi signals. The latter is barely noticeable.

szszrk• 2 years ago

I have a slightly smaller flat and the same problem as mentioned.

I DO have metal in the walls... reinforced concrete is a thing.

vetinari6• 2 years ago

That is probably never going to happen. Your problem is not wifi, but the environment, where you are using it.

We also have an old house, with 1m thick stone walls. The stone works as a good material to build a Farraday cage, so we have wifi only in the rooms that have AP. But the APs themselves are not connected wirelessly, that would be futile. Where it was possible, we ran ethernet cable, and where it was not practical, powerline is it. You can get pretty decent speed over powerline, I was surprised too.

maxglute2• 2 years ago

You can get pretty decent speed over powerline, I was surprised too.

How decent, I'm assuming new wires in old house?

amiga386• 2 years ago

I don't think that'll ever be possible if by "180 year old house" you mean "house with interior walls made of stone". You chould use powerline adapters (with or without wifi extenders) to get the signal through the house without running visible cables.

For example (and I'm not endorsing it, other manufacturers are available) the TP-LINK TL-WPA4220.

emmet4• 2 years ago

I was just being facetious. I've used powerline in the past, but it's proven to be an impossibility in this house as it was wired multiple times over the years and there's like 8 different circuits between 5 rooms.

I'll have to live with my dodgy mesh network.

bluGill2• 2 years ago

Won't happen. They are pushing WiFi to lower range not more. A routers in each room (ideally wired, but mesh if you can get a connection is okay) won't interfere with your neighbors WiFi (you won't even realize this is the cause of problems if it is!) and allows for much faster speeds.

neilalexander• 2 years ago

Considering how pervasive Wi-Fi is in the modern world, there isn't a huge amount of spectrum allocated for it. Only 3x 2.4GHz 20MHz networks and 5x/6x 5GHz 80MHz networks are enough to congest the most accessible spectrum in high-density areas.

The addition of the 6GHz range in Wi-Fi 6E and Wi-Fi 7 is a welcome addition there, but it's also interesting to talk about the fact that newer modulation schemes also help to improve the efficiency of available spectrum. For example, Wi-Fi 7's 4096-QAM theoretically improves transmission rates by 20% compared to Wi-Fi 6's 1024-QAM without increasing the channel width.

adrr• 2 years ago

5GHZ is smaller than that if you live next to a weather/airport radar.

https://www.kahuna-fi.com/post/dfs-tpc-tdwr

gruez2• 2 years ago

Considering how pervasive Wi-Fi is in the modern world, there isn't a huge amount of spectrum allocated for it. Only 3x 2.4GHz 20MHz networks and 5x/6x 5GHz 80MHz networks are enough to congest the most accessible spectrum in high-density areas.

In reality networks aren't transmitting all the time, so even though only 3-6 networks can be active at a time without interference, that's fine as long as everyone in the same apartment building aren't all trying to download a 100GB game update.

fmajid5• 2 years ago

WiFi 7 can do 320MHz channels in the 6GHz band. Fortunately the FCC ignored the cellcos' lobbying and assigned nearly the entire 6GHz band to WiFI rather than selling it to the rapacious data monopolists (motto: no one should ever transfer data for free without paying us a cut).

josefresco2• 2 years ago

Comcast is my only wired ISP option. They can't even deliver the speeds I pay for. I'll upgrade my router once they can actually deliver speeds these routers are made to handle. Historically I've been able to stay 1-2 generations behind and not lose any top end performance because our local Comcast node is overloaded.

no_wizard• 2 years ago

do you have Comcast Business or Xfinity (consumer)?

Business is marginally higher cost, but no caps on business plans and you get upgraded node priority. The likelihood your neighbors are also on business is low to none, and your traffic will get prioritized before consumer lines, not to mention there are less shenanigans to deal with when you interact with Comcast via their business unit, usually.

Its a better deal all around. I had them for a time, and while I still loathe Comcast and I'm so happy to be on a true fiber provider[0] (Ziply Fiber FTW!) I did find Comcast Business to be much superior service wise.

[0]: While not all of Ziply installations are FTTH, mine is, and its amazing, and its only 60 dollars a month.

josefresco2• 2 years ago

do you have Comcast Business or Xfinity (consumer)?

Both! Xfinity at home, and I have an office in the same town as my home and sub to Comcast business there. I know the download rate I pay for at my office is much, much lower than at home but it doesn't really effect me. With two teens, gaming and and an "all streaming" house I need the down speeds most at home.

I will consider it for "at home" when I close my office and my kids are off in the world (lol on that last one). Thanks for the tip!

martinald• 2 years ago

7 is actually a huge breakthrough imo because of multi link support. It's not just 'overkill'.

It can band the various frequencies (2.4 + 5 + 6) together transparently. This is actually a huge boon for normal users, as often devices get stuck on 2.4GHz which is congested to hell even though a 5/6GHz network is available (especially on a laptop or smartphone moving around). It should shift between them transparently.

However, Windows 11 doesn't support this yet on the release version, and I have a feeling compatibility could be really poor (let's hope not). But this feature alone is a massive breakthrough for reliability of WiFi.

Also the 320MHz bandwidth on 6GHz is hugely helpful (though in the UK/EU only 1 channel is available at that channel width, in the US there is much more spectrum allocated - I believe this should change in the future though). I struggle personally to get more than 1gig/sec out of real world usage on 160MHz channels, which is a pain because I can get faster than 1gig from my router but wifi is the limiting factor.

So I would basically expect to see real world speeds (ie: not right next to the router and through a wall or two) of around 3gbit/sec on WiFi 7, compared to 1gig/sec on WiFi 6/6E - as you will have a 320MHz 6GHz channel bonded with 160MHz 5GHz (and perhaps some 2.4, but I'm not sure if it can do 'tri band' operation, I've seen conflicting information about that).

bzmrgonz• 2 years ago

Well I'm pegging my hopes on bananapi, whichin collaboration with openwrt is building a wifi7 board!! https://www.cnx-software.com/2023/11/23/banana-pi-bpi-r4-wif...

frankjr• 2 years ago

More details at https://dongknows.com/wi-fi-7-explained/

Somehow I think I will be fine staying on 802.11bgn with the pathetic internet speeds I'm getting from my ISP.

Havoc• 2 years ago

I've got a wifi 6 era wifi bridge going for something that I can't wire.

That's working grand - 1 gig eth on both ends and link rate often ~1.8 in between so that's near enough to wired if you forgive the ms or two extra latency.

So unless my ISP decides it's time for 2.5gbe I'm not changing a thing.

I do have a 6E AP too but haven't used it yet.

7...I just don't see why I'd need it any time soon

johnklos• 2 years ago

What I'd really like is for someone to discuss and review any improvements that newer access points can have with older clients. For instance, 802.11ac brought beam forming that made a network of 802.11n clients work better. Otherwise, what's the point when the same hardware will be 1/3 the price when we finally start getting WiFi 7 clients?

BuckRogers• 2 years ago

No we don't need it yet. Wifi7 is approaching if not endgame wifi though because it combines all frequencies into one endpoint. That's really nice.

But I am in need of a new router-switch-AP so I'm going for it this year. I'm still on 802.11AC, and ethernet to my desk as always.

dingaling• 2 years ago

Still on 802.11n in an old solid-wall house with multiple APs connected over ethernet, because it works reliably and cost under £100 to implement with second-hand kit.

WiFi 7 is officially here, but routers are pricey. Do you need it yet

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