What is WiFi 7 and why do I need it?

WiFi 7 – or 802.11be as the standard is officially named – is the latest and fastest wireless technology. It’s up to five times faster than WiFi 6/6E and especially beneficial in places like conference and exhibition venues, arenas and airports or railway stations, where there will be a large number of users connecting within a relatively small area. This could apply to many organisations too, of course.

In such places, WiFi 7 will give everyone much more consistent and reliable performance. It uses a number of advanced techniques to do this and we have a white paper available that explains it all in some detail.

We’ve already launched our first WiFi 7 access point and over the coming year, we’ll be bringing other models to market, so there will be options for all scenarios. We’re quite excited about what that will mean for the many customers who will definitely benefit from adopting this technology.

That said, there will also be plenty of use cases in which WiFi 7 will bring no significant or discernible advantages over WiFi 6/6E, which in itself is a big leap forward from the WiFi 5 standard, and for many smaller customers, this may be a better option. You can think of these three standards – WiFi 6, WiFi 6E and WiFi 7 as being ‘good’, ‘better’ and ‘best’.

They all deliver much higher performance and quality than previous versions. It’s just a question of which one is right for you. To get help with deciding, we strongly recommend that you speak to one of our trusted authorised partners.