First Products with Wi-Fi 7 to Hit the Market in 2023

[Tsing]

Image: Netgear



The first products to feature the next generation of wireless technology, Wi-Fi 7, will be released in 2023.



Semiconductor company MediaTek shared that date in a press release published today that elaborates on the company’s world’s first live demo of Wi-Fi 7 (IEEE 802.11be) technology, which is designed to show key customers and industry collaborators that the new wireless standard is capable of hitting the speeds advertised by the Wi-Fi Alliance. According to that group, Wi-Fi 7 features a maximum throughput of at least 30 Gbps.



“The rollout of Wi-Fi 7 will mark the first time that Wi-Fi can be a true wireline/Ethernet replacement for super high-bandwidth applications,” said Alan Hsu, corporate vice president and general manager of the Intelligent Connectivity business at MediaTek. “MediaTek’s Wi-Fi 7 technology will be the...

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[Zarathustra]

Honestly, I'm still on 802.11ac, and haven't felt a need to make any changes.

I don't really do any heavy lifting over WiFi. All of that is wired.

Oh, and this is where I reiterate how much the new naming scheme annoys me. I much prefer the old IEEE chapter reference method.

 

[LazyGamer]

Main thing that newer technologies are helping with - despite all the 'faster than wired ethernet!' marketing hype - is better spectrum utilization to further limit congestion.

And I'm good with the naming scheme so long as it's backed up by the associated IEEE specification that can be used to hold these manufacturers accountable when they inevitably try to ship something that falls short.

 

[Brian_B]

I just got an email from Verizon telling me WiFi is dead because 5G is now here!

Will be interesting to see how these two start to really compete with each other

 

[LazyGamer]

Will be interesting to see how these two start to really compete with each other

I'd like to see the radios themselves converge - i.e., instead of having cellular, WiFi, Bluetooth, and whatever close-range high-bandwidth thing we wind up with all as separate radios, just have radios that can do all of them simultaneously, switching connections between bands and antennas as necessary.

Bit forward thinking to be sure, but software-defined radios are already a thing.

 

[Dogsofjune]

WiFi is fine for tablets, phones and such in our home. As mentioned above, heavy traffic is wired here.
It's nice we have new tumor creators coming out soon.

 

[Zarathustra]

I just got an email from Verizon telling me WiFi is dead because 5G is now here!

Will be interesting to see how these two start to really compete with each other

Of course they want all of your devices to connect via 5G directly. That way they can better harvest your internet history to track you and sell for ad purposes

It means the difference between getting an entire household worth of TLD's all mixed together, and getting them by device so you can figure out who is who!

 

[Brian_B]

Of course they want all of your devices to connect via 5G directly. That way they can better harvest your internet history to track you and sell for ad purposes

It means the difference between getting an entire household worth of TLD's all mixed together, and getting them by device so you can figure out who is who!

Wasn't IPv6 supposed to do that as well? Whatever happened to that anyway

 

[Zarathustra]

Wasn't IPv6 supposed to do that as well? Whatever happened to that anyway

It's slowly being rolled out.

Most mobile internet is already all IPV6.

Many home internet providers have also started to make IPV6 available.

And yes, part of the motivation of IPV6 (in addition to simply dealing with address space exhaustion) is to provide enough address space that NAT becomes obsolete, because there is enough address space that any device can connect to any other device 1:1.

The security and tracking aspects of this have been raised, and the IETF responded by including measures that allow you to rotate IP addresses frequently. Because there are so many ip addresses, the envisioned setting is that each subscriber would get a large block of block of addresses. The most common size is a /64 or /56 block.

If I have understood it properly:

A /64 block means the first 64 bits of the address are fixed, meaning the remaining 64 (out of 128bits in total) are yours to use, so you get 64bits or 2^64 or 1.8x10^19 addresses just to yourself.

A /56 block then means the first 56 bits of the address are fixed, and you get 72bits to yourself, so 2^72, or 4.7x10^21 addresses to yourself.

So, the way they reduce tracking per device is to have the DHCP rotate the addresses on the device on a regular basis. How often this occurs is configurable.

This certainly helps a little, but it is far from perfect.

As much as it makes the authors of the IPV6 standard foam at the mouth, I think I intend to use NAT66, in other words IPV6 to IPV6 network translation, similar to how your router today does NAT44, or IPV4 to IPV4 address translation.

IPV6 evangelists HATE this, as they see the whole purpose of IPV6 as getting rid of NAT once and for all, but IMHO it makes the most sense to me for my network.

I'd much rather have everything enter and exit my local network on one mixed garbled IP address (and tunnel that IP address through a anonymous VPN service)

I think I read somewhere that Verizon is starting to roll out IPV6 on FiOS by now, but I am not sure if it has hit my area yet.

I'll probably put off transitioning my network to IPV6 for as long as possible. Right now I ahve it set up and it works. I ahve no need to change anyhting, until the day I start not being able to access sites because they have moved to IPV6, but I feel like that is quite a long ways away.

 

[Grimlakin]

Wasn't IPv6 supposed to do that as well? Whatever happened to that anyway

Problem is ipv6 is a jumbled mess to figure out. With the humber of sections and the number of possible combinations in each section.. its just hard to mentally understand. It so much easier to know your ip is 10.0.27.234 than whatever the fudge ipv6 address is. And heaven forbid you want to assign static addresses thst are easily understood.

 

[Brian_B]

Problem is ipv6 is a jumbled mess to figure out. With the humber of sections and the number of possible combinations in each section.. its just hard to mentally understand. It so much easier to know your ip is 10.0.27.234 than whatever the fudge ipv6 address is. And heaven forbid you want to assign static addresses thst are easily understood.

I haven't seen anything use it yet for actual network traffic, other than some random stuff will fail (like printer discovery) if you try to disable it.

 

[Zarathustra]

Problem is ipv6 is a jumbled mess to figure out. With the humber of sections and the number of possible combinations in each section.. its just hard to mentally understand. It so much easier to know your ip is 10.0.27.234 than whatever the fudge ipv6 address is. And heaven forbid you want to assign static addresses thst are easily understood.

I agree. That's what you get when computer scientists develop anything.

They failed to understand just how unnatural anything hexadecimal is and how unnatural their multi-colon based shortcut structure is to just confuse things even further.

Add to that they also are under the impression that everyone should be using DNS for everything, being willfully blind to the vast number of small local networks that are managed by simy memorizing IPV4 addresses, something that is almost impossible with IPV6 addresses.

IPV6 is a huge fail. They were so traumatized by IPV4 address exhaustion that they went total overkill with an 128bit address space no one asked for. We don't need enough IP addresses for every atom on the planet. Not now, not ever.

They should have just kept it simple. Added another octet to IPV4 making it 40 bit and called it a day. The 1.099 trillion addresses that would have resulted in would have been more than adequate for a hundred years to come, and would have been WAY more human readable and usable than the disaster IPV6 became. They could even have reserved the first octet for an area code or country code or something like that, allowing it to be voluntarily omitted for domestic addressing, making even fewer digits used, and things easier to remember.

I wish we could just throw it out and start over.

 

[LazyGamer]

My understanding is that IPv6 is intended to allow for the 'addressing' of everything, and without NAT -

...and the security side of my brain is screeching in terror at the idea. For now, I disable it for all personal stuff, even though it's fully routable through Spectrum.

I'll go so far as to say that I like the idea of NATs - the inherent security of putting a whole network layer that has to process stuff by design is comforting.

 

[Zarathustra]

My understanding is that IPv6 is intended to allow for the 'addressing' of everything, and without NAT -

...and the security side of my brain is screeching in terror at the idea. For now, I disable it for all personal stuff, even though it's fully routable through Spectrum.

I'll go so far as to say that I like the idea of NATs - the inherent security of putting a whole network layer that has to process stuff by design is comforting.

The counter-argument to that is that just because you are giving up NAT, doesn't mean that you don't have a firewall between your LAN and your WAN just like you did before, that by default rejects incoming connections (unless you open them up on a per port basis).

That and NAT really isn't a security measure anyway. At least not a very good one.

Either way, I feel you, I like having my little network with a single interface to the rest of the world

 

[LazyGamer]

We'd say, "security through obscurity isn't security... but it still helps".

NAT means that there must be a translator between the networks - it's not going to stop a determined attacker, it just stops short of posting a public map

 

[Brian_B]

Hmm.. the more I think about it.

NAT is nice because it's free to use, and it is nice just having one address to remember to get back to all your devices. You need to set up port forwarding and recall specific ports, or tunnel in via a VPN, but I think that's easier than recalling entire addresses (especially v6). And being a single interface, it's easier to lock down

But I can see the computer scientists' point: DNS is a lot more flexible, and you can make names as memorable as you want, and it solves the "holy **** how do you remember all this hexadecimal mess". But registration isn't free, and it requires a DNS service running someplace, and DNS itself can be a vector for attack.

Neither is perfect, and since the benefits don't clearly outweigh the negatives, so I stick with the devil I know. And that's probably why IPv4 hasn't died out.

 

[Peter_Brosdahl]

I swear that Netgear image looks like the engineers were paying a bit too much attention to those old Maxi-pads "It has wings" ads from a while back.

 

[Peter_Brosdahl]

I just got an email from Verizon telling me WiFi is dead because 5G is now here!

Yep and meanwhile the news on TV has been going off all week about the Airlines wanting 5G use restricted, at least until further testing is done. For the last year or so where we live its been a real crapshoot with them and AT&T replacing the transmitters in their towers. One day you got bars, the next no so much.

 

[Zarathustra]

I swear that Netgear image looks like the engineers were paying a bit too much attention to those old Maxi-pads "It has wings" ads from a while back.

You know, consumer routers keep getting more extravagant looking, in some sort of attempt to make them LOOK like they perform better.

You know, stupid **** like the dead upside down spider from Asus:



Then they all get outperformed by something that looks like this, and is designed to blend in with an office ceiling panel.



That's how you know it's all for show, and has no functional value at all.

It just serves to try to get people to overpay for the "extreme gamer" aesthetic.

I'm surprised they don't put disco RGB LED's on them.

 

[Space_Ranger]

I heard RGB improves WiFi signal attenuation by 10-15%!