By David John Urban, Comcast
There are many features of Wi-Fi 7, the new version of Wi-Fi based upon the IEEE 802.11be standard.
Broadband service providers are rolling out next generation gateways with Wi-Fi 7 and customers are beginning to see Wi-Fi 7 phones, tablets, and computers for sale. This paper explores the features of WiFi 7 that improve reliability of the connection to customer devices running the applications that customers use. The simplest and most effective method to reduce lag, measured in milliseconds (ms) as latency and jitter is to ensure that the capacity of the communications channel far exceeds the traffic demand. The first step is a traffic demand model. This paper measures the traffic demand for common customer applications with common devices. The following step is to provide capacity exceeding demand with a margin of safety. The extremely high throughput of Wi-Fi 7, typically 5.8 Gbps, makes ensuring capacity exceeds demand quite easy. But this only applies to a single high-end device at close range with traffic that can take advantage of the high throughput without being overwhelmed by overhead. The tricky part is delivering the capacity that exceeds demand for customer applications for many devices of widely varying capability, from old to new, fast to slow, near and far. This paper reveals the tools of Wi-Fi 7 that can be utilized to meet customer reliability requirements.