Wi-Fi 7 rollouts

telcodad

Wi-Fi 7 is starting to become a go-to for the nation’s broadband service providers as they plunge deeper into the multi-gigabit era:

Who’s winning the Wi-Fi 7 race?
Ookla’s study of a subsection of US fixed wireline broadband service providers found that Charter leads on Wi-Fi 7 rollouts and customer adoption while fiber providers hold the edge on Wi-Fi 7 performance.
By Jeff Baumgartner, Senior Editor, Light Reading - June 12, 2025
https://www.lightreading.com/wifi/who-s-winning-the-wi-fi-7-race-

…. An obvious benefit of Wi-Fi 7 is more capacity thanks to 320MHz-wide channels that support tens of gigabits per second of data along with lower latency than prior generations and a multi-link operation that optimizes how connections can move freely between the 5GHz, 6GHz and 2.4GHz bands.
:
That’s giving telcos and cable operators much to like about Wi-Fi 7. Examples include Lumen, which in 2023 debuted a Wi-Fi 7 device for its fiber offerings (which are now poised to go to AT&T if that deal passes muster), and Comcast’s new XB10, a DOCSIS 4.0 gateway equipped with Wi-Fi 7, and a standalone Wi-Fi 7 router called the XER10. Google Fiber’s souped-up 20Gbit/s plans come with a Wi-Fi 7 router, and Wi-Fi 7 is a central feature for AT&T’s relatively new “All-Fi Pro” package.

Charter Communications recently announced that it has tripled the deployment of Wi-Fi 7 routers in the first quarter of 2025, noting that its Wi-Fi 7 customers are getting speeds 86% better than those with Wi-Fi 6. Frontier Communications, which is being acquired by Verizon, offers a Wi-Fi 7 router for no added cost to fiber subs who subscribe to speed plans of 500 Mbit/s or more. …

egeezer

telcodad
I have to wonder what uses would require 20 Gbps connections in a home environment. I can see latency being a factor for gamers, but I’d think 500 Mbps to 1 Gbps would be more than sufficient for WAN connections.

Also, I see proposals to take bands from OTA TV broadcast and allocate it to ISPs and Telcos. HC2 LPTV stations owner is pushing for bandwidth for 5GTV.

telcodad

egeezer I have to wonder what uses would require 20 Gbps connections in a home environment. I can see latency being a factor for gamers, but I’d think 500 Mbps to 1 Gbps would be more than sufficient for WAN connections.

Yes, once you get to a high enough speed, low latency becomes more important than any greater speed.

Donut417

egeezer Also, I see proposals to take bands from OTA TV broadcast and allocate it to ISPs and Telcos. HC2 LPTV stations owner is pushing for bandwidth for 5GTV.

ATSC 3.0 has some kind of Data casting capability. Seems many station owners want to invest in that. Then there is 5G TV, in my opinion it sounded like a better standard. Considering it was designed for portability in mind compared to ATSC 3.0 which is designed with DRM in mind.

egeezer I have to wonder what uses would require 20 Gbps connections in a home environment. I can see latency being a factor for gamers, but I’d think 500 Mbps to 1 Gbps would be more than sufficient for WAN connections.

The only thing a fast connection does for gamers is going to be downloading games quickly. Most games don’t use a ton of data. We are happy with our 100 Mbps connection, as it’s cheap and has unlimited data.

telcodad nd a multi-link operation that optimizes how connections can move freely between the 5GHz, 6GHz and 2.4GHz bands.

Ive heard that can be a cluster fuck. Not well implemented, especially in early devices. Im not sue how good 6Ghz works in the real world, considering the reduced range.

Jbob

I upgraded my main router to a wifi 7 model several months ago. My phone has wifi 7 and my daily driver PC has wifi 7. But I am mostly wired throughout my home. So far I’m not seeing the higher phone speeds while connected to the router any faster than the older wifi 6 model. But I haven’t dug down to see if any settings need to be changed which I’m fairly certain I need to do.