With the booming development of emerging applications such as mobile Internet, fully-wireless office, and augmented reality (AR)/virtual reality (VR) immersive home entertainment, individual’s requirements for wireless access bandwidth gradually increase from 1000 Mbit/s to 10 Gbit/s. As such, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) launches the latest wireless local area network (WLAN) standard — 802.11be, also known as Extremely High Throughput (EHT), which will be officially designated as Wi-Fi 7
Since its creation in 1997, Wi-Fi has grown rapidly to become a house hold name, due to it simplicity, availability and ease of use, it’s among cheapest and easiest network solutions that can be deployed within minutes and it is used to share a network connection, files, media etc. Wi-Fi can also scale from a home use case to an enterprise case or commercial use cases.
Wi-Fi has evolved through seven standard generations, starting with 802.11 we are now in the era of Wi-Fi 7 or as 802.11be. The 6 GHz spectrum of Wi-Fi 6E is passed down to Wi-Fi 7 based on 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz. With cutting-edge features including multi-link operation, Wi-Fi 7 achieves a 4x improvement over Wi-Fi 6 in terms of space resource utilization and potential Wi-Fi speed increase of up to 46 Gbps.
Generations of Wi-Fi standards
Over the years, Huawei has been committed to investing vast human capital and material resources in the Wi-Fi standard formulation. For example, Dr. Osama Aboul-Magd of Huawei has served as the chairman of the 802.11ax (Wi-Fi 6) Task Group, and Dr. Edward Au, as the technical editor of the 802.11be (Wi-Fi 7) Task Group, and have been fully involved in the formulation and release of the Wi-Fi 7 standard.
According to a public report released in 2021, Huawei is on record for submitting the largest number of Wi-Fi 7 standard contributions. Beyond that, Huawei is also the leading contributor in terms of standard contributions for Wi-Fi 4, 5, 6, and 7. So far, Huawei has accumulated many innovative technologies and patents, and has been the front-runner in the Wi-Fi industry standards.
Wi-Fi standard contribution ranking
On September 20, Huawei launched the industry’s first enterprise-class Wi-Fi 7 AP at HUAWEI CONNECT 2022 in Bangkok, helping enterprises develop more innovative applications. The following were the highlights of the AP
Wi-Fi 7 AP (AirEngine 8771-X1T)
- Ultra-high performance: Innovative software features, such as CoSR and multi-OFDMA, greatly improve spectrum utilization and upgrade the maximum rate to 18.67 Gbps.
- Optimal experience: After the 6 GHz radio of the AP is switched to 5 GHz, the AP works in Tri-Band of 1×2.4 GHz radio and 2×5 GHz radios. Furthermore, the built-in Dynamic-Zoom Smart Antennas of the AP can intelligently adapt to omnidirectional and high-density scenarios.
- Phenomenal reliability: Huawei’s innovative air interface slicing and dual fed and selective receiving features help to control the latency within 10 ms and achieve 99.999% reliability. A further innovation is the hardware architecture of the AP, which reduces its board layers from 5 to only 3. With no antenna reflector boards, feeders or shielding cover is no longer needed, significantly improving the reliability of hardware.
Dual fed and selective receiving implementation
On October 26, 2023 won the award for the “Best Enterprise Wi-Fi Network 2023” from the wireless Broadband Alliance (WBA) during it 11th WBA industry award held in France. The summary the panel list is as follows:
“Huawei’s new Wi-Fi 7 AP showcases the company’s many innovations, including intelligent antenna tuning, dynamic 5GHz and 6GHz band switching, extended backhaul/power infrastructure, and IoT sensing capabilities to meet the growing traffic demands at many enterprise locations. The outstanding technical innovations demonstrated in the Wi-Fi 7 installation at Shenzhen Talent Institute can be scaled at other high-demanding enterprise locations worldwide through the company’s global presence”
Huawei AirEngine Wi-Fi 7 series APs open the door to new experiences. Innovative Wi-Fi technologies can be used in a wider range of scenarios. For example, in the metaverse and XR remote collaboration scenarios, Huawei’s innovative software features provide ultra-high bandwidth, low latency, and highly reliable communications to achieve a real-time response. In addition, Huawei Wi-Fi 7 APs can connect to a large number of IoT devices simultaneously. This in turn provides powerful performance, excellent experience, and extraordinary reliability to help enterprises construct an intelligent IoT world.
Wi-Fi 7 use case scenarios
All wireless communications need to obtain the right of way (ROW) for air interface communications. The ROW is often referred to as spectrum. For example, the 6 GHz frequency band adopted by Wi-Fi 7 creates an additional 1200 MHz spectrum, offering seven 160 MHz channels or three 320 MHz channels. Leveraging the 6 GHz frequency band, Wi-Fi 7 supports ultra-large bandwidth of at least 30 Gbps, 2.4 times that of the 5 GHz frequency band.
However, due to this technology being relatively new, the outlook for the commercial use of Wi-Fi 7 is challenging to say the least. This is mainly due to the ambiguity of 6 GHz spectrum licensing, and an incomplete industry chain for Wi-Fi 7. According to survey data, only 25 of 233 countries and regions have explicitly granted use of Wi-Fi 7, and more than 200 countries and regions have not formulated clear policies for the use of the 6 GHz frequency band, imposing challenges in the application of Wi-Fi 7 technologies. Huawei’s AirEngine Wi-Fi 7 AP can switch the 6 GHz radio to 5 GHz, and work with one 2.4 GHz radio and dual 5 GHz radios, addressing the preceding challenges. It is predicted that Wi-Fi 7 APs will be put into limited commercial use from 2023 to 2024, while the Wi-Fi 6 industry has entered the maturity stage. Therefore, Wi-Fi 6 will remain dominant over the next one to two years.
6 GHz spectrum licensing in countries and regions around the world
Huawei is and remains committed to helping all its customers build fast, stable, and smart fully-wireless networks through innovative technologies.
