By Dileep Kumar Soma, Charter Communications; Stephen Paul Emeott, Charter Communications
The growing pervasiveness of bandwidth-intensive applications like 8K streaming, AR/VR experiences, and cloud gaming could benefit from wireless technology improvements. Wi-Fi 7 emerges as an answer, promising a multi-gigabit solution. However, achieving an increased speed consistently across a typical home environment can be challenging. Multi-Link Operation (MLO) is a feature in Wi-Fi 7 that enablesdevices to concurrently transmit and receive data on multiple wireless links. This mechanism allows WiFi 7 devices to aggregate available bandwidth, effectively creating a wider data pathway, signifying an increase in speeds compared to traditional single link operation.
While a Wi-Fi 7 router equipped with MLO offers improvements, physical barriers and distance can still limit signal strength, potentially hindering multi-gigabit Wi-Fi speeds in certain areas of a home. This is where Wi-Fi 7 extenders come into play. A strategically positioned extender acts as a bridge, receiving the Wi-Fi signal from the router and retransmitting it to previously out-of-reach areas. This paper explores the role of Wi-Fi 7 extenders and various multi-extender configurations in attempting to achieve the goal of maximizing the range of multi-gigabit Wi-Fi coverage.