Our Network solutions, expert Scott Coombs spends most of his time helping our customers align with industry best practice. Scott took some time away from his desk to discuss how Bechtle ensure our customers are running reliable, fast and secure network solutions.

Can we start by explaining with Wi-Fi7 is and how it differs from previous Wi-Fi standards?

It’s almost five times faster, it can allow up to five times more users, and its latency is reduced, giving around 100 times improvement on previous standards.

Ok, but what specific advancements does Wi-Fi 7 offer in terms of speed, latency, and reliability?

With things like latency, that is going to impact things like video calling, video streaming and latency sensitive business applications such as virtualised desktop environments and legacy applications. All will realise incredible benefits. With audio and video, you won’t get the stutter effect you get with earlier standards and when you might have latency on the network. You know what it’s like, you are on a work video call, and you get that video ‘pixelated’ effect or a drop in the audio, you’ll get a lot less of that!

And, in terms of reliability?

Again, the way it’s using the radio frequencies, there are a few things that have been done to vastly improve reliability and the type of connection.

There is something called “pre-amble puncturing”. Let me give you an example. Let’s say you’ve combined multiple channels together. In this example, you’ve joined four 20Mhz channels together to make one 80Mhz channel. Then, let’s say one of those channels suffers some sort of interference. In previous versions of Wi-Fi, you would have lost the entire 80Mhz channel. However, in Wi-Fi 7 you will just lose the 20Mhz, or the part of the channel that’s suffering from interference. You’ve still got the other 60Mhz available to use.

They’re introducing something called MLO, which is Multi Link Operation. As you know, in Wi-Fi you have three bands; 2.4 Gigahertz (GHz), 5 GHz, and since Wi-Fi 6E, you've got the 6 GHz band available.

When your device connected via the previous iterations of Wi-Fi, they were connecting to one of the bands above, and they would stick to that band. If you moved Access Point, it might change band depending on what was better, but it would stick to that chosen band. MLO allows aggregation of those bands, so one device could, in theory, attach to all three at the same time. Then, a user’s connection can easily move between all three on the same connection or use all three simultaneously.

This gives users a far more reliable connection. So, if the 2.4 band suddenly becomes congested, it still has 5 and 6 to use as its technically already connected, so there is no kind of disconnect.

In terms of Wi-Fi 7, how is it handling the growing demand for high bandwidth applications?

It's allowing devices to use more resources on the network. We call these ‘resource units’ that are assigned per device on the network. It used to be that you could only have one. Now, with Wi-Fi 7, you can have multiple, so that gives you effectively multiple streams that you're using.

Particularly in the 6 GHz band, it's allowing you to have much wider channels, so each band has multiple channels. The 2.4 GHz only has three usable channels because they overlap, so you have to be very careful with that. 5 GHz has up to 24 non-overlapping channels.

For 2 GHZ and 5 GHz, depending on where you are in the world and where you're in the country – for example, if you're near a radar station or an airport - you're going to have less reliable channels available because of interference from other services using the same wireless frequencies.

6 GHz however, the radio frequencies come from old analogue television. When analogue television was finally turned off, that bandwidth was re-purposed for Wi-Fi and as a result, Wi-Fi 6 and above has a lot more bandwidth, and there’s no fear of overlapping channels.

So, what you could do in Wi-Fi 6 is actually combine channels, however in Wi-Fi 6 this was limited to 160-Megahertz worth of channel. In Wi-Fi 7 you can combine 320-Megahertz, so you can put a lot of channels together, giving you a really wide ‘pipe’ you can use, giving you even more bandwidth for high bandwidth applications.

But also - now I don’t want to go too deep into the technology - but there is also something called ‘modulation’. This is how each “wavelength” is separated out to transmit your data. Each time a new Wi-Fi comes out, this value shrinks. Although very technical, this is one of the key things to keep in mind though each new iteration of Wi-Fi. Each time, it’s almost like shrinking everything down so you can get more down the same link.

Could you define what you mean by channel, or give me a good analogy?
I suppose the easiest way to describe it is that it’s a bit like a television. You have a television signal that is coming to your house, so, like your television, your Wi-Fi aerial picks up the whole bandwidth. However - back to the television analogy - you don’t want to see everything at once, you just tune in to the channel you want to watch at the time. Your Wi-Fi access points work in a similar way, they all need to be ‘tuned’ into a different channel so that you know what access point you’re connected to. Then, if you have two access points right next to each other, both broadcasting on the same channel, they’re going to interfere with each other. That will create a poor connection that will cause your users and devices to drop off the network or lose packets of data, etc. So, you need to keep access points on separate channels where possible. Now for 2.4 GHz, that was really hard because, like I said there were only three channels. When Wi-Fi 5 came along you got a lot more channels, and Wi-Fi 6 has even more. Obviously when you’re breaking down all that bandwidth into these smaller channels, you’re reducing the amount of bandwidth that can be used per connection, which is why Wi-Fi 5 introduced the ability to bring channels together. But what that does, is have the knock-on effect of reducing the number of channels that can be used, so you couldn’t do it in big environments with lots of access points, and you need the channels to be nice and small, giving you less interference. So, it’s not a ‘one Wi-Fi fits all?’ If you've got a smaller environment or specialist environments where you think actually, you know what, I've got a few users that are using a lot of bandwidth. Maybe they're doing lots of video editing or something like that, or maybe they're uploading massive files to cloud storage somewhere. What you can do in these cases is use the 2.4 GHz and leave the 5 GHz free for normal users. This strategy keeps those 5 GHz channels nice and small (so less interference and more access points), while still allowing your high-capacity users to work efficiently. OK, so when you’re planning environments with a high density of devices such as offices or stadiums or intense urban areas, are there any other considerations? You have to think in 3D! The signal from an access point will go through floors, ceilings and roofs. So, when you are planning, you can’t have two access points on the same channel that are right next to, above or below each other. You have to think in three dimensions, up down and all around. Let’s say, for instance, you have the ground floor of a building with three access points in a row using channels 3, 6 and 11. The floor above, you would try not to have access points directly above those on the ground floor. You’ll try and stagger them a bit if you can, you might put the channels in reverse order (11, 6 and 3). But like I said, you have to be ‘stack aware’ to limit interference around – say - a large and dense environment like a large office or a stadium. Can you tell us more about Multi-Link Operation (MLO) in Wi-Fi 7 and how it improves network performance? Up until now, when a device connects to the network, it can only use one ‘band’. So, it’s like you wanting to drive from A to B, where you can choose one of three roads, but you can only choose one. If the road you're on gets busy, you're stuck. With MLO you can aggregate two or more of those bands together, so it’s like you’re suddenly given two roads to use. So, if you get a problem on one road (band), you can instantly change to the other, or you can take a much bigger car and use the whole road, or two or three roads to drive down simultaneously. Ultimately this is ‘driving’ - pun intended - a better user experience in terms of latency, speed and reliability. These are obviously incredible features, but do I need any special end user devices to take advantage? Yes, your device will also need to be Wi-Fi7 enabled to make use of it and to be able to negotiate with the access point. The advice we give to our customers when they’re buying a lot of end user devices, particularly like the latest technology, is that you need to check how that end user device is connecting. Is the end user going to get the best experience using that kit with the Wi-Fi they’ve got on their premises? If a customer came to us and bought 1,000 laptops that are Wi-Fi 7 enabled, there is a conversation to be had with the customer, that, in order to get the best user experience out of that investment, they probably should look at upgrading their access points. Then, conversely, if a customer has just purchased a brand new Wi-Fi 7 network, the inverse is true. We would ask that customer if they have a technology roadmap, and work with them on that to ensure they can take full advantage of the new technology they’ve just invested in. Also, as Wi-Fi 7 has significantly more capacity and speed, you’re now going to need high capacity switching at the back end. So, if you’re going to roll out Wi-Fi 7, you really need to look at what switching it’s being plugged into, as well as the cabling. For example, is the customer still running CAT5 cabling? It’s an investment right across the network estate, not just a case of changing the device in the ceiling. What impact will Wi-Fi 7 have on industries beyond typical consumer use, such as IoT, healthcare, or manufacturing? High-speed, super-reliable connectivity is not limited to somewhere you can get a network cable to. So, for example, CCTV cameras. Historically these were cabled due to the amount of bandwidth high-definition cameras require. With Wi-Fi7, we can now look to put AI-enabled, high-definition, CCTV cameras in locations that are difficult to get a cable to. That opens up opportunities for machines used in manufacturing which may use AI to automate the manufacturing process, or virtual and Augmented Reality (VR/AR) devices which are used to train users in manufacturing or healthcare environments which require reliable, high-bandwidth, low-latency connectivity. Expanding on healthcare uses, the industry is seeing more robotics being used to complement surgical procedures. Up until now, you probably wouldn’t have wanted that on Wi-Fi because, what happens if the signal is lost, or a device moves and all of a sudden, it’s dropping out. Now with Wi-Fi 7, you not only have that capacity and speed, but the reliability is there for more critical applications. You can now start thinking about what you can actually do, now you know you can fully detach a device from the network. What challenges or limitations still exist with Wi-Fi 7, and how might these be addressed in future standards? The big limitation - which will always be there - is that it’s a shared medium. You are sharing the bandwidth with everyone that is connected to that access point. Every iteration improves efficiency, but it is still a shared medium, so if an AP goes down, it will have an effect on multiple users. Whereas with a cable, this is not the case, you have it all to yourself and your device. That’s always going to be the downside with Wi-Fi, I don't think we'll ever get away from that. But each time it’s doing it better. That said, Wi-Fi 8, I can almost guarantee is already in the pipeline!
Conclusion: Staying current with best practices, evolving threats, and technology changes in networking, Wi-Fi and communications is complex and time consuming. At Bechtle, we can deliver modern, secure, and effective Wi-Fi and network infrastructure to all our customers. We provide managed services and thought leadership, building technology roadmaps with our customers. We promote our experience and drive customer value through the use of blogs, seminars and our hugely popular annual Technology Summit. At Bechtle, we pride ourselves on being a solutions first company, why not come and talk to us about your networking and Wi-Fi requirements.
For more information, please contact: Niamh Burgess-Smith Head of Infrastructure, Server and Storage Tel: +44 1249 467 102 Email: niamh.burgess-smith@bechtle.com