Wi-Fi 7 in 2025: Will this be the year? | Hacker News Reader

Wi-Fi 7 in 2025: Will this be the year?

networkworld.com

21 pointsohjeez7 comments

Meanwhile a WiFi 7 access point costs 10x what a WiFi 6E one does. In my country we have fibre to the premises national broadband, but even its top speed is just 1 Gbps, so nobody has any motivation to upgrade their home wifi.

A unifi U7 Pro is $135 vs a U6 Pro for £120 (+VAT) in the UK, so if you're in the market for an AP not much stopping you going for WiFI 7.

Of course if your internet speed isn't close to 1Gbps you probably won't notice the difference, let alone if the APs connection sits on 1 Gig ethernet link...

I'm looking at a WiFi 7 deployment. But not because of the feature set. The true win was extra spectrum with 6E. But considering where most vendors are with their 6E product life cycle, 7 will provide more ROI.

The most interesting part of Wi-Fi 7 to me is MLO. Having 6E bandwidth is nice, but being able to combine 5 GHz and 6 GHz seems like it's going to be the first meaningful increase in wireless bandwidth since Wi-Fi 5

For the home user, MLO has potential. For my enterprise deployment, it's sadly a no-go due to how it's implemented and how that implementation affects the user experience.

That's interesting to hear, do you have a link to read more, I'm curious.

I don't unfortunately. Best I can offer is WiFi 7 in-depth. But that's about a 400 page read. I'm speaking from deploying/managing WiFI for the last 20 years.

The "boiled ocean" version is this. Wireless connectivity is a dance between client and AP. Client holds the decision making and AP can at best influence those decisions. MLO is gonna require a new SSID just for MLO capable devices. But you still must maintain separate SSID for non-MLO devices. This is a show stopper for services like eduroam.

Multiple SSIDs is also a PITA because the second a user experiences an issue, they will try to connect to whatever SSID they can. Now that profile is saved. Now every time the client connects it might hear multiple SSIDs that are saved as auto-join. Now you have an unpredictable client experience.

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