Finally, Wi-Fi 7 is official

The Wi-Fi Alliance has started certifying devices with Wi-Fi 7 – despite the first Wi-Fi 7 router being presented in July 2022. That’s 18 months ago. The first one was the H3C Magic BE18000, soon followed by other Wi-Fi 7 routers by various manufacturers. They all supported Wi-Fi 7, a revolutionary innovation that made for good advertising, even though none of them were officially certified. On top of that, the performance of a router primarily depends on its number of antennas and the hardware performance (CPU, RAM, etc.). The Wi-Fi version is secondary.

The dubious thing: companies haven’t only been advertising something for the last 18 months that didn’t officially exist, it’s the way they’ve been advertising it. After all, it makes a difference whether packaging says «Wi-Fi 7» or «Wi-Fi 7 ready».

I was particularly shocked by TP-Link’s marketing, which advertised its first routers at the beginning of 2023 as follows: «TP-Link released the industry’s first Wi-Fi 7 router—Archer BE900 and the first Wi-Fi 7 Gaming router Archer GE800.» Like H3C, TP-Link is a Chinese company offering similar products. Just like US company Netgear, which had launched their router Nighthawk RS700S before TP-Link did.

Nevertheless, I tested TP-Link’s Archer BE900 router later last year – but without its Wi-Fi 7 function, as there were and still are no notebooks with Wi-Fi 7. The test would’ve hardly made sense with a smartphone, as they only have one antenna and I always carry out my tests with two.

The first smartphone chips with Wi-Fi 7 were announced in November 2022. Shortly afterwards, the first devices with Mediatek Dimensity 9200, Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 and, surprise, Wi-Fi 7 were launched. Only notebooks still don’t have Wi-Fi 7. But that’s about to change, the first notebooks with actual Wi-Fi 7 will be launched in February at the latest.

The fact that devices with the latest Wi-Fi standard were presented a year and a half before the official release and were available shortly afterwards is extremely strange. However, in this case, it’s not quite as unusual as it seems. After all, the specifications of the latest WLAN standard were known well in advance and the jump from Wi-Fi 6E to Wi-Fi 7 is smaller than with previous changes.

Here’s Wi-Fi 7 compared to previous versions:

Wi-Fi 7 allows for up to 16 antennas, achieving a data rate of 46 gigabits per second – in theory. Data processing performance also increases thanks to the new maximum 320 MHz channel bandwidths. In addition, there’s an improved modulation process and multi-link operation for simultaneous use of different frequency bands as well as other smaller innovations.

The coming weeks will show whether all devices that have been advertised with Wi-Fi 7 in the past will actually be certified.