Wi-Fi 7 Moves Forward, Adding Yet Another Protocol
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