TECH NEWS – While WiFi 7 is starting to gain traction, WiFi 8 is on its way, and it won’t have any major innovations.
Wireless Internet speeds have been increasing at a rapid pace over the past few years. Many people are still using the WiFi 6 standard, but WiFi 7 was released in January of this year. This has finally made its way into PCs on motherboards with Intel Z890 and AMD 870/E chipsets (not everyone connects to the Internet with an Ethernet cable). WiFi 8 is already being talked about, but this time it will not be about doubling the bandwidth of WiFi 7, but rather increasing the efficiency of the current speed.
PC World reports that MediaTek says there are many ways to fix this. These improvements revolve around optimizing the coordination between access points and connected devices. Features such as Coordinated Spatial Reuse (Co-SR) and Coordinated Beamforming (Co-BF) are among the best optimization techniques that seek to strengthen the signal connection between access points and devices. Coordinated spatial reuse can improve communication between access points to optimize output performance and is expected to improve transmission performance by 15-25%. This is the successor to Spatial Reuse introduced in Wi-Fi 6 and allows access points to coordinate their power output to improve communication. Coordinated beamforming, in turn, can more precisely route signals across the mesh network, increasing throughput by an additional 20-50%.
“The throughput offered by Coordinated Beamforming (Co-BF) in the next-generation MediaTek Filogic is significantly improved, with an increase of 20 to 50 percent in a mesh network setup with a single controller AP and an agent AP,” MediaTek says. Then there’s Dynamic Sub-Channel Operation (DSO), which can dynamically allocate bandwidth according to the capabilities of the device. This alone can increase throughput by up to 80%. So instead of reserving a subchannel for a device that can download a file faster because it has better Wi-Fi antennas, Wi-Fi 8’s DSO allows the access point to decide which device should get higher priority. Refined modulation is another technique that can introduce finer transmission settings to allow for smoother signal strength transitions and improve throughput by 5-30% as you move around the house.
In short, WiFi 8 is an evolution of the existing WiFi 7 standard. Although it retains the same 23 Gbps bandwidth, 4096 QAM modulation, number of channels, and frequency bands (e.g., 2.4, 5, and 6 bands), it can sustain higher speeds more efficiently.
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