Wi-Fi 7 took off while everyone was looking at AI

It does talk about "Multi-Link Operation".

Unless it's changed in the last 5 minutes, the second paragraph seems to have an explanation:

> 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. That means that when your 5GHz band is at capacity, it’ll just send the data down the 6GHz pipe, and vice versa. The result should be lower latency when you’re on a busy network, which is critical when you’re not able to wire up with ethernet.

Read the comment before reading the article...but it wasn't that bad. It's not a technical deep dive but more a short commentary post as a heads-up that it's available now even if not everyone is talking about.

It also lists the biggest benefit for gamers (It's posted in the "gaming" section of Verge) in the second paragraph.

You are exaggerating a bit.

> - No explanation of why AI headlines overshadowed Wi-Fi 7.. one is taking steps for changing what "work" looks like for Humanity while the other is..?

Author wanted to fit in the term AI in there. Drives traffic. Has electrolytes - it's got what the NPC crave.

To be fair it's CES coverage.

The Verge is a "corporate messaging" website.

Interview with X CEO (Comments disabled)

Their transportation editor Andrew J. Hawkins:

```

Waymo’s driverless cars are finally ready for the highway

VW’s software division and Bosch are testing robot parking and EV charging

Hyundai says hydrogen will play a ‘prominent role’ in going carbon neutral

Kia’s ‘Platform Beyond Vehicles’ is a family of modular electric minivans for businesses

Lamborghini will measure your heart rate as you burn rubber around the track

Meet the new Tesla Autopilot, same as the old Tesla Autopilot.

Tesla is recalling another 1.6 million vehicles in China.

Tesla’s Autopilot fix ‘doesn’t go far enough.

```

I wonder which companies buy advertising on The Verge? It's crazy their anti-tesla bias.

I usually wait until their's Ubiquity prosumer equipment available before even thinking about a wifi upgrade.

As such, I upgraded to wifi6 less than 18months ago, I don't think there's a meaningful reason to assume it will be soon for me to upgrade again.

My typical phone upgrade schedule doesn't have me buying a new one until... eh, probably 2027 or so. By then I imagine I'll have a wifi7 router at home.

> For me it'll be at least a year before wifi 7 matters

Probably longer for me. WiFi currently meets my needs just fine, so there is no reason to toss out perfectly good equipment to upgrade. When my current APs break and I need to replace them, they'll have whatever standards happen to be on the market at the time.

Asus has sub-$1000 wifi 7 routers right now. None of them seems to be supported by asuswrt-merlin though, perhaps because they're still very new.

Ubiquiti U7 Pro is only around $200 USD.

That's a pack of 3 high end mesh APs though, about $550 per. Each AP has 2 10G and 2 2.5G ports as well as 2 separate 4x4 6 GHz radios so you can backhaul and transmit at the same time. Little of that price has to do with Wi-Fi 7.

If you look at the price of 1x normal type AP instead of 3x BMWs the price really isn't that high. The story is the same on the client side where most any m.2 adapter should be less than $40 to upgrade to.

Yeah, seriously... How excited they expect us to get? Freaking AI made its debut and has accelerated nonstop since and y'all want us talking about new WiFi versions? I didn't know there was versions!

I have 2GB fiber and can only get 250MB on WIFI. Faster speeds helps out with app updates, syncing/backing up photos etc. Especially noticeable on my PS5 when there are game/system updates.

We don't need cars. Everyone has a horse already.

Electric light? No thank you - I have all these candles already.

Progress doesn't stop because we think a problem is solved.

Still, with more and more wifi devices around, more options to reduce congestion is always welcome.

This is very much the opposite of my experience, M.2 Wifi modules are very standard, cheap and solid. All my motherboards have one installed for the wifi and it's trivial to swap it out. I have just replaced it when it stopped working or I wanted some Wifi/Bluetooth spec it didn't support.

The Intel AX210 is the most recent one I've used, but I assume they'll release a WiFi 7 version.

M.2 is just PCI-E at the end of the day, so should be entirely viable to adapt one if something didn't have an M.2 A-key slot.

Intel PCI-e cards are some of the best and quite reasonably priced (~$35 for 6E), unfortunately their Wi-Fi 7 card is only compatible with Intel motherboards so far.

I upgraded my previous laptop from an older intel ac wifi chip to a ax210 chip (6E). It really helped reduce latency and reliability especially on the 5G band. A good upgrade, it cost like $20 at the time.

You can often find these mini m2 board to full size pci-e adapter cards or find these adapters pre-mounted on a board for sale.

A lot of the motherboard ones do turn out to be upgradeable, basically just laptop m.2 cards in a custom built portion of the board. That said, if you want a low-touch option a PCIe form factor adaptor is generally the best bet. You can get them for ~10 dollars on Amazon. If the back of your case is a bad position you can get combo RP-SMA cable extenders/antenna mounts for about $20 (that'd be like the little antenna pair on a wire most motherboard options come with). For the actual Wi-Fi card you can use a standard m.2 2232 laptop card at that point.

Qualcomm is as usual absolutely no where to be found. There's some $300-$400 AP-class m.2 cards from Compex & clones, but stock is dodgy even for these. https://www.524wifi.com/index.php/network-modules-adapters/w...

MediaTek has been doing wifi 7 PCIe chips for a bit, but it seems like they're only really available on AMD motherboards so far. :(

Reports from Intel side are that maybe they've started doing something fishy or some-such with their m.2 cards? Folks on non-Intel can't seem to use them.

The lag here is alas, in my view all too typical. I'd really love for USB & m.2 cards to be out much faster, to speed adoption, but it feels like the industry always slow walks this shit out.

Has that ever happened?

You can grab an Intel BE200 module (EDIT: which may be platform dependent, see below) or similar for about 30 bucks. For latest generation client side Wi-Fi cards Intel has traditionally had the better quality options on the driver side, not to give an illusion the cards and driver are perfect though. The limitation is you can't have a fully integrated system, like a MacBook. If the storage is upgradeable there is a high chance the Wi-Fi is.

it's pretty rare I see wifi cards in thin-and-light laptops these days unfortunately.

Laptops, largely, have become SoC's; at least for the most popular lines of business laptops (and I include Macbooks in that).

Things like the Thinkpad X1 Carbon and Surface's (incl. surface book) etc;

I'd give it a few months.

Both laptops (sans Apple) and desktop PCs (even USFFs) tend to use the NGFF M2.2230 form factor cards, typically with two antenna connectors.

Yes, even your super fancy high-end desktop PC motherboard ultimately has an NGFF M2.2230 WiFi and BlueTooth combo card plugged in somewhere. It might be ultimately buried under a large VRM or other heatsink, but it's there nonetheless. Granted, replacing these sometimes necessitates entirely removing the motherboard from the case.

Note for desktop PCs that you'll likely hook up an actual antennas to the RP-SMA connectors on the rear IO panel. Especially so if you're looking to take advantage of 6GHz spectrum. These antennas are a far less popular include with motherboards (even high end ones) than years ago, but they're generally only about $15-20 to purchase if you need better signal and range.