Withered vines, old trees and dim crows, air-conditioned Wi-Fi watermelon!
It is said that there are three treasures in summer, but if I can only choose one of the three, I can live without watermelon and I can live without air conditioning, but I can't live without Wi-Fi. And not only is it impossible to live without Wi-Fi in summer, but it is best to stay with it all year round to achieve your goals. Just tell me how important Wi-Fi is!
In fact, Wi-Fi is ubiquitous in daily life. Whether it is at home, in the office, or in various public places, Wi-Fi is almost indispensable. But who would have thought that Wi-Fi can obtain It actually didn’t take much time to reach where we are today!
1 Attack on Wi-Fi 7
As the saying goes, where there is demand, there is motivation to move forward. It is less than 30 years since the birth of smartphones. Compared with cars and airplanes, they are tens or even hundreds of years behind them. However, in these short 20 to 30 years, smartphones have developed extremely rapidly, and have even become the The most representative technological product of the era.
Like mobile phones, Wi-Fi has now become a basic need for the public. Wi-Fi chips and terminal products are growing explosively every year. According to an IDC data, global Wi-Fi chip shipments It will reach 4.9 billion units in 2022, accounting for more than 40% of the shipments of major mainstream Internet solutions.
A report also from IDC also shows that China’s network market size will be US$10.24 billion in 2021, of which WLAN market growth rate has reached 47.2%. Looking at the world, the WLAN market growth rate has also reached 20.4%, which means that even In the era of 5G boom, the future of Wi-Fi is still bright.
While the Wi-Fi market continues to grow, Wi-Fi technology has also ushered in a new iteration, and has now officially evolved to the seventh generation, which is Wi-Fi 7. Wi-Fi 7 is the next generation Wi-Fi standard. Its technical standard is called 802.11be. Compared with Wi-Fi 6 launched in 2018, Wi-Fi 7 with more advanced standards has undoubtedly improved by leaps and bounds.
To put it simply, in addition to different IEEE standards, Wi-Fi 7 can support 4096 QAM, which is about 20% higher than Wi-Fi 6’s 1024 QAM. At the same time, Wi-Fi 7 also supports the 6Ghz frequency band, and the maximum bandwidth has been increased from 160 MHz to 320 MHz.
In addition, Wi-Fi 7 can also support up to 16 antennas for transmission, which is twice as many as the Wi-Fi 6 standard 8 antennas. In theory, it can increase the physical transmission rate by more than twice. Calculated in this way, the theoretical peak speed of Wi-Fi 7 has reached 46 Gbps, far exceeding the 9.6 Gbps of Wi-Fi 6. This does not mean that Wi-Fi 6 is slow, it can only be said that Wi-Fi 7 is too fast. .
However, the most important change of Wi-Fi 7 is that it supports automatic switching of the three frequency bands of 2.4 GHz, 5 GHz, and 6 GHz at the same time. It can be said that Wi-Fi 7’s “exclusive secret skill”, while Wi-Fi 6 can only Switching from 2.4Ghz to 5Ghz frequency band cannot switch from 5Ghz frequency band to 2.4Ghz frequency band. For users, Wi-Fi 7 can flexibly use different frequency bands according to network conditions, thereby ensuring smooth and stable networking and greatly improving networking. The experience can be regarded as an innovation to the pain points of Wi-Fi 6.
It is obvious that Wi-Fi 7, while making up for some shortcomings of Wi-Fi 6, can better meet users’ needs for extremely high throughput and low latency in high-density application scenarios, and will be more Contribute to the wide application of emerging scenarios such as 8K video streaming, wireless gaming, industrial IoT, immersive AR/VR, telemedicine, telecommuting, metaverse, and edge cloud computing. However, like Wi-Fi 6, the expansion of the Wi-Fi 7 application market also requires a process, and this requires support from industry manufacturers.
On the one hand, to fully unleash the potential of Wi-Fi 7, an end-to-end solution is needed, that is, both your mobile phone and router must be equipped with Wi-Fi 7 chips; on the other hand, the so-called industry standards are actually just industry standards. Since the basic standards we all abide by are standards, there will be the possibility of breakthroughs. For any aspiring company, not being satisfied with standards is the attitude we should have.
As a leading player in the Wi-Fi industry for more than 20 years, Qualcomm has always been at the forefront of Wi-Fi evolution, promoting industry standards and technologies to meet the growing needs of customers, terminals, applications and services. In the previous major evolution stages of Wi-Fi, Qualcomm has played a key role. For example, Qualcomm played an important role in introducing MIMO and MU-MIMO to 802.11n and 11ac, and also took the lead in introducing OFDMA into Wi-Fi 6. .
In terms of Wi-Fi 7, Qualcomm has launched the FastConnect 7800 mobile connection system this year, which can provide support for Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth connection systems for mobile devices such as mobile phones. It is also mainly for routers, covering enterprise-level and home applications. Mesh networking products and the third-generation Qualcomm Professional Networking Platform (Networking Pro) series of operator gateways.
Among them, the FastConnect 7800 mobile connection system is a Wi-Fi 7 solution for the next generation of smart terminals. It is backward compatible with terminals using the previous generation Wi-Fi standard and supports peak speeds of up to 5.8Gbps and sub-2ms. Delay can be used to shorten device pairing time and increase connection range.
At the same time, Qualcomm has not been satisfied with the status quo. Instead, it has developed the industry's top high-frequency multi-connection concurrency technology based on supporting the key advanced features of Wi-Fi 7, which is currently one of the most leading technologies in the industry.
Before understanding Qualcomm high-frequency multi-connection concurrency technology, we also need to talk about Qualcomm real-time dual-band Wi-Fi and Qualcomm 4-way dual-band concurrency technology.
When using Wi-Fi on a daily basis, you will find that even if you use your mobile phone to play games and watch TV shows, the network speed in different rooms will be very different, and the stability will also be different. For example, there will be a very good network in the living room, but once When I got to the bedroom, the Wi-Fi became laggy. In fact, this is related to the 2.4G and 5G frequency bands supported by WiFi. The former has good coverage and strong wall penetration ability, but the rate is low, while the latter has a higher network transmission rate , but the coverage is small and the wall penetration ability is low. weak. If the mobile phone cannot utilize these two frequency bands at the same time, there will be a problem of lag and disconnection when moving the room.
In order to change this situation, Qualcomm has brought a "killer feature"-Qualcomm real-time dual-band Wi-Fi technology. As the name suggests, real-time dual-band Wi-Fi technology is to connect two Wi-Fi network bands at the same time. Even if the network signal in one band is not good, the other band can be used to ensure that the network is always connected, or the two are superimposed. Achieve the effect of network acceleration.
There is no doubt that Qualcomm’s dual-band Wi-Fi is a very innovative feature that greatly improves the overall user experience while reducing network latency, and the subsequent launch of real-time dual Wi-Fi 6 technology is here evolved from the basis.
After the arrival of the Wi-Fi 6 era, as more and more devices and large-bandwidth applications increase, users’ demand for networks is constantly increasing. The two frequency bands of 2.4GHz and 5GHz are becoming more crowded. Overcrowding will cause network speed to decrease. Problems such as slowness, frequent disconnection of devices, and vulnerability to interference frequently occur, and the user experience is also affected.
Qualcomm’s real-time dual Wi-Fi 6 technology can achieve 4-channel dual-band concurrency, that is, it supports 2-channel data stream transmission in both the 2.4GHz and 5GHz frequency bands, bringing 2x the speed and 2x the coverage. Users do not need to manually switch networks. Mobile phones can give full play to the advantages of the 2.4GHz frequency band and the 5GHz frequency band, further alleviating the congestion problem of Wi-Fi networks.
Later, with the development of Wi-Fi 6E, Qualcomm also expanded dual-band concurrency technology to the 6GHz band, which can work simultaneously in multiple frequency bands of 2.4GHz and 6GHz, bringing users higher data transmission rates and more Low latency.
After the release of Qualcomm FastConnect 7800 mobile connection system, Qualcomm expanded the 4-way dual-band concurrency (DBS) feature to higher frequency bands, which is what we call high-frequency multi-connection concurrency technology.
high-frequency multi-connection concurrency technology is based on Qualcomm's 4-way dual-band concurrency technology. It works concurrently in real time through multiple connections in the 5GHz and 6GHz high-frequency bands and aggregates their throughput. It is not affected by the low bandwidth and network of the 2.4GHz frequency band. The impact of congestion can significantly reduce latency. To put it simply, high-frequency multi-connection concurrency technology can make full use of the bandwidth of the high-frequency band, whether it is 5GHz or 6GHz, and can greatly improve the throughput of Wi-Fi according to different policies in different regions. In comparison, it is obviously more than 4 There are many dual-band concurrencies on the road.
Of course, whether it is dual-band Wi-Fi, real-time dual Wi-Fi 6 technology, or high-frequency multi-connection concurrency technology, it is one of the representative technologies of Qualcomm’s end-to-end solutions, many of which have already been It has a wide range of applications. While helping to improve the performance of Wi-Fi networks, it also gradually improves users’ wireless connection experience.
Finally, I have something to say:
Wi-Fi 7 is an innovation in wireless network technology. Its emergence can bring faster transmission rates, lower network delays, avoidance of network congestion and many other network experience improvements to end users, thus truly Opening a new chapter in wireless connectivity.
But as we said before, every iteration of Wi-Fi standards is indispensable with the help of industry pioneers such as Qualcomm. Only continuous technological breakthroughs can continue to promote the continuous development of Wi-Fi technology.
In the future, with the popularization of products equipped with Qualcomm Wi-Fi 7 technology, I believe that consumers will soon be able to enjoy the ultimate networking experience brought by Wi-Fi 7. By then, 8K live broadcast, cloud gaming, remote office, The realization of a series of cutting-edge application scenarios such as edge computing and VR/XR is really no longer far away.
