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Wireless Networking Intel Apple

Intel To Introduce Wi-Fi 7 In 2024 As Apple Plans Imminent Move To Wi-Fi 6E (macrumors.com) 50

Posted by BeauHD from the what-to-expect dept.
According to a new report from ETNews, Intel is planning to install its next-generation Wi-Fi 7 (802.11be) technology in devices by 2024 as Apple transitions its devices to Wi-Fi 6E. MacRumors reports: Wi-Fi 7 is the successor to Wi-Fi 6E (802.11ax), bringing two times faster data processing speeds of 5.8 Gbps and more stable 6 GHz bandwidth stability, as well as support for up to 36 Gbps when working with data. Intel plans to expand its Wi-Fi 7 development efforts ahead of its introduction to the market in 2024 and intends to apply its technology predominantly in laptops before expanding to other devices. "We are currently developing Intel's Wi-Fi '802.11be' in order to obtain the 'Wi-Fi Alliance' certification, and it will be installed in PC products such as laptops by 2024. We expect it to appear in major markets in 2025," Eric McLaughlin, vice president of Intel's wireless solutions division, said at a recent press conference in Asia.

Meanwhile, Apple is on the cusp of transitioning its devices to Wi-Fi 6E. While it was heavily rumored to debut with the iPhone 13 lineup last year, Apple has yet to release any devices with support for Wi-Fi 6E. That is expected to change this year starting with the iPhone 14. Apple's long-rumored mixed-reality headset is also expected to feature Wi-Fi 6E. Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo said that head-mounted display devices in 2022, 2023, and 2024 will offer Wi-Fi 6/6E, Wi-Fi 6E/7, and Wi-Fi 7, respectively, but it is unclear if this information was related to Apple's product roadmap specifically. "Wi-Fi 6E offers the features and capabilities of Wi-Fi 6, including higher performance, lower latency, and faster data rates, extended into the 6 GHz band for processing speeds of 2.4 Gbps," notes MacRumors. "The additional spectrum provides more airspace beyond existing 2.4GHz and 5GHz Wi-Fi, resulting in increased bandwidth and less interference."

Other tech giants like Qualcomm, Broadcom, and MediaTek are also planning to release Wi-Fi 7-based products in the next few years.
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Intel To Introduce Wi-Fi 7 In 2024 As Apple Plans Imminent Move To Wi-Fi 6E More

Intel To Introduce Wi-Fi 7 In 2024 As Apple Plans Imminent Move To Wi-Fi 6E

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  • Meh (Score:1)

    by NFN_NLN ( 633283 )

    Does this use all the bands in parallel? I'm hoping more people move to these new bands so I can get solid 802.11a wherever I go :)

  • When did WiFi have situations when it was not working with data again? Is it that there is an analog voice mode now or something? If so, how exactly would that be measured in Gb/s anyway and why wouldn't it be better to convert it to "data" so it could use the much higher bandwidth? What is this much lower limit for?

  • Why? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Gravis Zero ( 934156 ) on Monday August 01, 2022 @10:24PM (#62754558)

    Serious question: what is their to gain from an ever increasing wireless speed that cannot be utilized? Does anyone need to transfer data that fast wirelessly? I honestly cannot think of a realistic situation where anyone would need either of these. I've been using 802.11n for years and never thought, "gee, if only this were faster."

    Is there some super high bandwidth application I don't know about that people are dying to use?

    • Re:Why? (Score:5, Funny)

      by Mspangler ( 770054 ) on Monday August 01, 2022 @10:34PM (#62754584)

      Streaming 10 different 4K videos into your house at once?

      I don't know either at least in a home situation. Corporately it might matter sometimes, like if everyone in the meeting is watching a different show during the quarterly financial report.

    • video (Score:2)

      by rapjr ( 732628 )
      I think transferring video is one use for it. RAW format or even compressed video on a 4K or 8K camera can use a lot of storage. Today you would only move it around using a wired network, but wires are always a bother. It would be much more convenient if your camera could send the video you just shot to a wireless ingest server box (say in your car). Most people may not need this now, but eventually everyone might find it useful. Create a backup disk image of your laptop which has a 100TB SSD? It's pr

      • Today you would only move it around using a wired network, but wires are always a bother.

        How fast is your wired network?

        • The last Dell laptop I bought is a POS and only came with a 100Mb wired connection, so I use Wifi most of the time because it's much faster.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Kremmy ( 793693 )
            100Mbit on a laptop? Is it literally a 20 year old laptop that can't talk to newer wireless to begin with? 802.11b if you're lucky?

      • I think transferring video is one use for it. RAW format or even compressed video on a 4K or 8K camera can use a lot of storage. Today you would only move it around using a wired network, but wires are always a bother. It would be much more convenient if your camera could send the video you just shot to a wireless ingest server box (say in your car). Most people may not need this now, but eventually everyone might find it useful.

        My understanding that in this specific use case, I cannot see any pro transferring RAW video wirelessly to a server box in their car. Server box in car with WIFI just seems unreliable and unnecessary. And the fact of the matter another transfer is required when the car gets back to home/studio. There are a lot of technologies that need to work long before this use case is practical including server level tech in a car.

        Create a backup disk image of your laptop which has a 100TB SSD? It's probably going to happen and it would be useful if it can be done wirelessly. That said, wireless is never 100% reliable and will fail in odd situations. So to some extent it is just for convenience, not necessity.

        Why is a full backup image required? Why not just upload the specific data? I would like

        • A full backup is the easiest option if your system is simple. If your data is stored off your system on a NAS or whatever, it probably has a backup strategy designed in, and it's probably easiest to use that.

          My understanding from a brief perusal of surveys is that most people who are backing up their PC are doing it to "the cloud", but that doesn't speak to the question of professional users specifically.

          • In the case of Pros, their data is far larger than the consumer so backing up to the cloud will take a lot longer and far more expensive. From what I can tell the YouTube channel Linus Tech Tips has built multiple in-house petabyte servers just to store their videos.

    • Re:Why? (Score:5, Informative)

      by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Monday August 01, 2022 @11:34PM (#62754666) Homepage Journal

      Remember, the bandwidth is split between everyone on the same AP, and most people only have one... and these days it's common for literally nothing in the house to have a wired connection except the AP. Speeds like this enable a network with multiple users doing file sharing, streaming, etc. Those are also best-case speeds.

      For one or two clients, n is just fine. For a bunch of users, not so much.

      • Re:Why? (Score:4, Interesting)

        by tlhIngan ( 30335 ) <[ten.frow] [ta] [todhsals]> on Tuesday August 02, 2022 @06:25AM (#62755138)

        the bandwidth is split between everyone on the same AP

        Incorrect. The bandwidth is split between everyone on the same frequency regardless of network, AP or mode.

        So if everyone uses the same channel, regardless of band, it's split between everyone on the same channel - even if the APs are different or even if they use peer to peer mode. The Wi-Fi header is unencrypted so everyone who receives it knows how long the channel will be busy and avoid transmitting and corrupting the packet (this is part of the CSMA/CA (carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance) protocol).

        It's why non-standard settings like high speed headers aren't used - you can enable it, but if someone on the channel isn't use it, no one is using it as otherwise those not using it will not see the headers and just blindly transmit even if someone else is, making the whole thing useless.

        Remember the option you used to have that could restrict your network to certain clients? You still have the option, but it's mostly useless as it does nothing other than control who can cannot to your network but doesn't influence anyone else on the same channel.

        • Incorrect. The bandwidth is split between everyone on the same frequency regardless of network, AP or mode.

          Sure, that's fair.

          Remember the option you used to have that could restrict your network to certain clients?

          Unless you mean MAC filtering, no I don't. But if you did, you could always spoof MACs, and depending on the encryption regime used, often snoop them.

          Anyway now that I've done some research I can see an even bigger problem, because wifi 7 has even bigger channels. Getting that speed requires a channel that is 320MHz wide. Wifi 7 will have six overlapping channels (or just three channels, depending on regulatory area) and it will use OBSS avoidance to automatically restrict those down to 16

    • I also don't see much use in the home for these speeds - if it really gets these speeds in practice, which is less clear. There are engineering / science cases for wanting to stream a lot of data, but that is a small market.

    • Got an NAS which is connected via dual 1gbps to my router.

      Most of my devices are connected to my router via wifi, with a couple of 1gbps connection.

      If only my wifi was faster, my laptops can map the NAS drives as local drives and dump all it's data there. This becomes a pain when am dealing with larger files.

      I intend to upgrade my router to 10gbps and the NAS to 10 gbps connection as well. But the bottleneck will still be wifi for my laptops.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      I do not think there generally is any advantage beyond marketing to those people that understand noting beyond "higher numbers". For the time being, no regular user has any real benefits from > 1Gbps. There is just no use case. This my see so little adoption, it eventually will stop being manufactured. Essentially it is just people that continue in a direction that made sense once without reflection.

    • 640K ought to be enough for anybody
    • High density. The bandwidth boost is irrelevant. But in third world countries with barely operational and overpriced mobile networks (I'm of course referring to the US... Just came back and immediately celebrated proper 4G), WiFi is critical.

      Higher bandwidth and a separate band which isn't saturated by 802.11, 802.11b (1mb/s), 802.11a (6mb/s) beacons allows for much higher density. It also greatly decreased interframe spacing.

      The result is that you can pile 50,000 people into a stadium and provide meaningfu

      • Then there's devices. It is not entirely unusual for a house to have as much as a hundred WiFi devices online these days. Well, I'd imagine that a typical 4 person house will have on average about 10 wifi devices each. This includes TVs, washing machines, coffee pots, handheld devices, video games, PCs, door bells, locks, lights, vacuum cleaners, set top boxes, IoT (Zigbee/Znet) gateways and such. But 100 is not surprisingly much anymore.

        That would be atypical, because smart home devices aren't supposed to

        • Bluetooth to what exactly? Smart home devices generally need to keep active network connections even when your phone and laptop are out of the house.

        • smart home devices aren't supposed to connect via Wi-Fi

          There is no one standard. All those different standards means you either need a bunch of different smart hubs to gateway to ethernet, or you need devices which don't need one. You can literally buy dev boards which can do wifi (poorly) for under $2, so there's certainly no money to be saved by using bluetooth — it literally makes more sense to have an 802.11b/g AP creating a separate network for your IoT BS than to dick around with zigbee, bluetooth, or any of that jazz. For under $10 you can get an E

        • I did mention IoT gateways... but there are smart outlets which are WiFi and there are some lights which are WiFi.

          Still, I don't believe my house is atypical and if you include 3 different IoT gateways (Hue, Ikea, 433Mhz), fire alarms, watches, game consoles, room heaters, air cleaners, blah blah... I have 87 IP addresses assigned at last check.

          So... I think I'll stand by my claim about 50-100 devices being common. I imagine it will get worse over time... who knows... maybe the new common IoT spec from Goog

      • It is not entirely unusual for a house to have as much as a hundred WiFi devices online these days. Well, I'd imagine that a typical 4 person house will have on average about 10 wifi devices each.

        That's crazy! Then again, I do go out of my way to avoid buying stuff that is "smart" because I know it's easily compromised and that it already spies on you. That aside, IoT is generally low bandwidth.

        If I had 802.11n, I'd probably upgrade now.

        Sure... but I wired my house with CAT6, so there are only few devices that use WiFi out of convenience. The bottleneck is my cable modem, so faster WiFi isn't going to help anything.

        802.11ac is worth it if only for the longer battery life and lower power usage on clients.

        I will definitely look into that angle.

        • I have Ethernet everywhere as well. And you are in a somewhat special case. I just visited the states for the first time since COVID and I noticed that every house I visited, no matter how technically inept (and one I visited, the people would struggle to ring a door bell) has a massively growing number of connected devices.

          I really don't think bandwidth is a good reason to upgrade from N. I think coverage, compatibility, and most importantly power consumption of connected devices is the seller.

          If none of t

          • You can try to avoid the invasion of privacy. That ship has long sailed.

            Not really because privacy isn't a binary option. I do know that my cell phone's location (feature phone so no WiFi) can be tracked and I don't keep it on my person. I use encrypted DNS, use a cookie whitelist, I block all trackers/ads, block all remote images in emails (protonmail), don't have smart devices or IoT, use Linux, a customized Firefox (no remote sync), and use generic phone number (555-555-5555) for those grocery store "discounts" (it's illegal for them to track CC#s). When I find a good suita

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by nucrash ( 549705 )

      I had to move to WiFi 6 purely for mesh networking. Expanded coverage has been helpful in my area where I cap my Cellular data, working outside, my entire property is covered.

    • I regularly rip blu-rays (apparently I’m the guy propping up the physical media purchase market) then want to send them across the network to my Plex Media Server. When I’m ripping back-to-back it takes me roughly as long to wirelessly transfer the finished rips as it does to produce them in the first place, which means I have to stay on top of transfers lest I run out of the limited free space on my family’s general use laptop. It’s tedious at times, and I’ve thought about upg

      • I still buy physical CDs, we're not alone.

        • I’m actually importing four albums at the moment. You can find some of them digitally in the US, but they’re missing tracks or only available via streaming, which may be fine for stuff I want to enjoy once, but not so much for the music I’ll listen to dozens of times over the next few decades.

    • Re:Why? (Score:4, Informative)

      by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Tuesday August 02, 2022 @10:36AM (#62755776)

      Serious question: what is their to gain from an ever increasing wireless speed that cannot be utilized?

      Wireless standards are more than just speed. They incorporate new methods to prevent interference and if you completely ignore speed and compare your wifi over time you'll find you have the upgraded standards to thank for the dramatic increase in reliability of your network even as interference sources have skyrocketed.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by MobyDisk ( 75490 )

      Many years ago I wired my house for 100MBit ethernet. Today I run Gigabit on those same wires and I get *almost* gigabit speeds. I keep everything on a local file server, so I really do use that speed. By the numbers, I could ditch the hard-wired network and just use wireless. Even if the wireless routers can't quite match the speed, maybe I just need an access point on each floor.

    • mount my nas over wifi? watch movies and copy files over wifi since I'm not allowed to run cables between rooms in rented apartments?

      yeah, I mount over nfs over wifi. I have wifi6 and going to 6e in phases. upgrade to 6 was incredible. even using usb, wifi6 (there is no 6e on usb yet) I get about 350MB/sec going thru comcast to the wan. I have not done iperf testing but when I remote vnc across wifi6, its as snappy on window moves as local ethernet was (gig-e) when it first came out. that's impressi

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Kremmy ( 793693 )
      I think the real answer is convenience. Using off the shelf stuff, not necessarily consumer level but off the shelf, we can get wired connections breaking 10Gbps. The network switches that do that are overbuilt to be able to provide that bandwidth across all the ports. That's skipping that gigabit ethernet has been standard issue for 15 plus odd years. If there's a need to the bandwidth delivery we could always wire in.
      The convenience of wireless sells it. Being able to connect by entering a password instea
    • Wireless VR headsets.
  • IDGAF about faster wifi. What I want them to work on is solving saturation problems where in dense cities you can have hundreds of wifi routers visible from a single client, and they all step over each others, saturating channels, etc... They need to (much) better work together, even when there are multiple obsolete versions of the wifi protocols (as will be the case for decades to come even if some magically better protocol comes up).

    • Wifi 7 has a bunch of techs to help with this specific problem, notably including OFDMA and frequency puncturing.

  • In a residential setting, you are still limited by the pipe, and the clients. I'm running two Apple Extreme AC routers connected by ethernet. I know the cognescenti like to crap on them because they can't be configured at a granular level, but my links are faster than my DOCSIS cable, they handoff between routers seamlessly, cover the entire house and yard and up the street a bit. AC is as fast as any of my clients have. Why spend money ? It's like buying a Ferrari and driving it in NYC during rush hou
  • That simplified naming lasted a long time, all of 2 years from what I see. I wonder when 6E+ devices will appear?

    • I wonder when 6E+ devices will appear?

      Apart from Apple, they won't.

      I have been planning Wi-Fi 6E for years, ever since I heard it was on the horizon from my Ruckus vendor back in 2017. Seven independent 160MHz bandwidth channels, each delivering speeds of 1Gbps+...what's not to like?

      Then I attended a trade conference last March and found out the band news: the industry is dropping it like yesterday's newspaper. None of the major players are marketing it heavily. Why not, when the performance is amazing?

  • Wake me up when real world speeds match the specs on the box. Until then, I'll be using Ethernet in situations where I need the bandwidth.

  • $90 a month for broadband. We are cattle being led to the slaughter.

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