Summer is here. Have everyone arranged for air conditioning, WiFi, and watermelon? Air conditioning and watermelon may still be optional, but without WiFi, what would our lives be like? Indeed, now, whether in production or life, the importance of WiFi wireless networks has increased significantly. In enterprises, various devices do not want to be bound by the "little braid" of network cables; in homes, TVs, air conditioners, microwave ovens, and even door locks and curtains all want to communicate more with their owners through WiFi. However, when problems such as network lag, frequency band interference, and wireless security arise one after another, do you feel that WiFi is “not good” anymore? What to do, classmates WiFi 7 can find out.
Qualcomm, which leads the development of WiFi technology
Speaking of WiFi 7, Qualcomm has something to say here. Qualcomm not only has 5G and Snapdragon chips, it also plays a pivotal role in the WiFi field. Since 2015, Qualcomm has shipped more than 6 billion WiFi chips, and after each generation of WiFi technology appears, Qualcomm will launch the corresponding latest products as soon as possible, and the newly emerged WiFi 7 is no exception.
Why WiFi 6 has just become popular, but WiFi 7 has already made its debut so quickly? What new wireless application experiences can the emergence of WiFi 7 bring us? With such questions, to top website conducted an interview with Hu Peng, Product Marketing Director of Qualcomm Technology Company, and Ye Sikun, Senior Product Manager of Qualcomm Technology Company, to discuss the future development of WiFi 7.
First of all, Hu Peng and Ye Sikun reviewed for us the major development history of WiFi that Qualcomm participated in:
As early as 1998, Qualcomm was committed to providing solutions for home wireless networking experience. In 2002, Qualcomm had launched 802.11a WiFi Products, WiFi 6 was launched in 2017, and WiFi 7 end-to-end products were launched in one go this year, basically following the rhythm of launching a new generation of new technology WiFi products every five years.
Not only that, Qualcomm is also the first manufacturer to launch 2.4GHz and 5GHz dual-band WiFi, effectively expanding the limited number of 2.4GHz channels. As early as the Wi-Fi 5 era, Qualcomm was the first to introduce MU-MIMO technology, which greatly improved the forwarding efficiency of WiFi and multiple devices for simultaneous data transmission. There is also Qualcomm's Wi-Fi SON technology, which allows a novice user to easily implement wireless roaming on the router.
When Qualcomm launched the Wi-Fi 6 product in 2017, it introduced the industry-leading uplink and downlink OFDMA technology for the first time. For the Wi-Fi standard at the time, it only required support for downlink OFDMA, but Qualcomm, which was very pursuing technological innovation, enabled the uplink data of wireless routers to also support OFDMA technology. And Qualcomm has also expanded to provide more MU-MIMO support. At the same time, in order to meet the increasing needs of users for wireless device connection, wireless products using Qualcomm WiFi6 technology can support up to 512 device accesses per channel. From the current point of view, this is also a relatively high access number in the industry.
In addition, when Qualcomm launched the immersive home networking platform (Immersive Home) product series in 2020, it had already launched the concept of 4K QAM, and this 4K QAM is the technology currently used in WiFi 7 products. Qualcomm is actually ahead of schedule One generation ago, end-to-end 4K QAM was already implemented in the era of WiFi 6.
In addition to constantly innovating for the development of WiFi technology on the network side, Qualcomm also brought the FastConnect mobile connection system solution on the mobile phone side, extending the 4-way dual-band concurrent technology to high frequency bands, thereby effectively coordinating the use of different wireless access devices. The data connection method allows users to use higher performance access methods to achieve data transmission.
Qualcomm WiFi 7 brings huge changes to digitalization
The revolutionary WiFi 7 has new features of faster transmission, multiple connections, and adaptive connections. Compared with WiFi 6, WiFi 7 has four major technical improvements.
first, 4K QAM. has been introduced above. As early as the WiFi 6 period, Qualcomm has begun to adopt 4K QAM, a very efficient modulation method. Theoretically, when 4K QAM is used to convert digital signals into wireless signals for transmission, its efficiency can be increased by 20%. Therefore, under the same bandwidth, 4K QAM's data transmission performance will be better. In this regard, starting from FastConnect 6900, including FastConnect 6700, Qualcomm has already supported 4K QAM on the basis of Wi-Fi 6, and will undoubtedly have a strong first-mover technology advantage.
second, 6GHz. Originally Wi-Fi 6 and Wi-Fi 6E used the 5GHz and 6GHz frequency bands. The Wi-Fi band bandwidth supports automatic adaptation of 20MHz, 40MHz, and 80MHz, up to 160MHz. With Wi-Fi 7, a 320MHz frequency band bandwidth has been added, but the 320MHz frequency band bandwidth can only operate in the 6GHz frequency band. It is a pity that the Wi-Fi in the 6GHz frequency band is not currently open in China, so the large bandwidth advantage of the 6GHz frequency band in our country is not yet realized.
Third, Multi-Link Operation (MLO). does not have a 6GHz frequency band, so will we not be able to enjoy the high bandwidth of WiFi 7? This is not the case. Qualcomm also provides Multi-Radio technology in the multi-connection operation of WiFi 7. Data can be concurrently transmitted through different frequency bands at the same time, thereby achieving greater throughput and lower latency.
For example, there is currently no 6GHz frequency band in China and no continuous bandwidth of 320MHz. In China, the 5 GHz low frequency + 5 GHz high frequency multi-band concurrent method can be used to combine the 160MHz + 80MHz frequency band bandwidth, thus making Qualcomm's WiFi 7 The device transmission rate is increased to 4.3Gbps. If the 6GHz frequency band can also be used in China in the future, with the support of 320Mbps high-frequency band bandwidth, the maximum transmission rate can reach 5.8Gbps.
Similarly, Multi-Link Operation (MLO) is also a feature that Qualcomm has supported for a long time. In 2018, Qualcomm began to promote Multi-Radio technology. Therefore, when Wi-Fi 7 supports MLO, endpoints or routing products using Qualcomm wireless chips will have a great performance boost for multi-connection operation functions.
Fourth, adaptive interference punching (Preamble Puncturing). For wireless data transmission , 's co-channel interference with is one of the main factors affecting data transmission performance. Before WiFi 7, the frequency band bandwidth could only be reduced when encountering co-channel interference. For example, the continuous frequency band bandwidth of 160MHz would be reduced to 80MHz, 40MH or even 20MHz. After WiFi 7 adopts adaptive interference punching technology, when interference occurs in the middle of the frequency band, the interfering frequency band can be bypassed through "hole punching", thereby effectively improving the bandwidth usage efficiency of the entire frequency band and providing higher data transmission capabilities, and more wireless connections.
Digital application of WiFi 7
Through the above introduction of WiFi 7 technology, we can understand that WiFi 7 can bring higher network transmission to wireless transmission through higher frequency band bandwidth, more flexible multi-connection operation, and more optimized modulation technology. performance, greater network bandwidth. High transmission performance will greatly reduce the distance between data frames, thereby effectively reducing forwarding delays and improving application response speed.
What conveniences can high throughput and low latency bring to our digital applications? Two Qualcomm technical experts gave us some prospects:
The first is the transmission of large amounts of data in some broad scenarios. For example, in an airport environment, there will be a demand for data transmission of up to 1~2T, and it needs to be sent within a short time. At this time, Wi-Fi 7, known as "10G WiFi", can come in handy. By replacing wired wirelessly (Wi-Fi 7), extremely efficient data transmission can be achieved. Moreover, in some engineering and construction scenarios, there are many video surveillance requirements. In the past, it could only be deployed through wired methods, and construction was very difficult and cumbersome. With the launch of Wi-Fi 7 on the market, wireless can effectively reduce the difficulty of construction, allowing more wireless business application scenarios to emerge.
Secondly, there are many devices in the medical field, which require a high degree of synchronization during control, that is, low latency to turn the device on and off. In previous technologies, because Wi-Fi technology could not provide lower latency, it needed to rely on a large number of lines. Now due to the low latency of WiFi 7, synchronization can be significantly increased, resulting in lower switching latency and control via wireless.
There is also the field of education, where teachers provide online video teaching, send video courseware, and camera proctoring. In the future, you can even use VR glasses to experience the real feeling of class in a virtual classroom. These can all be achieved through WiFi 7 wireless networks.
In short, as digital applications continue to penetrate people's production and life, many digital applications that were previously restricted by network cables with high traffic, low latency, and multiple users can be solved through WiFi 7 technology in the future. In order to achieve this goal earlier, Qualcomm is working hand in hand with many network companies to jointly promote the wheel of digital applications.
