The latest generation Wi-Fi protocol brings better speeds and data handling, but it does little to bridge various communications technologies. That, in turn, makes it more difficult and more expensive to design chips because they must integrate and support multiple wireless technologies, including different versions of the same technology.
Wireless communications technologies are often victims of their own success, with each new generation promising to solve the congestion problems caused by the fervent adoption of the last generation. This is unavoidable in a world where every day there are new use cases for wireless connectivity, from autonomous vehicles to robots on hospital rounds to further dependence on the cloud, including Microsoft’s interest in making Windows a cloud-based service for consumers. The proliferation of needs has spawned a menagerie of communications protocols, each with its own niche, and even novel protocols, like Matter, to interconnect older protocols.
Wi-Fi, once considered “the poor cousin to cellular,” is now the most commonly used wireless communication technology, with more than 3.8 billion devices shipping annually and nearly 20 billion devices in use, according to the Wi-Fi Alliance, the trade group that coined the term and registered it as a trademark in 2000.
“At lower frequencies, everything looks like glass to a radio wave,” said Marc Swinnen, director of product marketing at Ansys. “But as you get to higher and higher frequencies, things get much more opaque and even small barriers will block the signal. Additionally, long wavelengths go round corners more easily than shorter wavelengths. So at shorter wavelengths, you need more line-of-sight. With both 6G cellular and Wi-Fi 7, you’re going to have to put in many more base stations that are much more local.”
Wi-Fi underpins most IoT applications, whether consumer or enterprise, and therein lies the problem. If every home appliance needs spectrum, from the smart lightbulb to the EV pulling into the garage, and every office device needs spectrum from the wireless printer to the 4D display in the conference room, then interference and network slowdowns seem inevitable.
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