Will it make my ISP give me more internets to push through that WiFi? No? Then it isn't going to change my world, sadly.
this post was submitted on 10 Jan 2024
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Yeah, it will help and it won't. If you're uploading through a typical cable internet connection, WiFi will almost never be the bottleneck. But if you're streaming 4k in a part of your house that doesn't have good coverage while other people use the same connection, it could make a difference.
I do a lot of streaming from my desktop to my TVs and I occasionally have bandwidth problems, so this could help that. And I have 300 up / 300 down fiber Internet, and in parts of my house I have problems getting anywhere close to that on WiFi. So WiFi 7 might help with those cases even if in the end your ISP is usually the bottleneck.
If you are at the edge of your Wi-Fi range I suspect this won't help as much as you think
My ISP gives 1000mb down, currently no wifi 6 device can fully utilise that unless it's practically kissing the access point. So it will improve throughput over wifi 6. If your ISP doesn't deliver more than ~50mb, you might not notice
While I think most agree with you, it's important to note there is more to networking than WAN access. Streaming 4k in your home network over WiFi sounds pretty awesome for security cameras and other self-hosted medias.
Who needs 4k security camera footage streaming in their own home?
The media center is far more relevant here, but again, current speeds are pretty adequate for the majority of people.
People who think the cameras will stop people from breaking in and stealing their shit, or the ones that think cops will somehow catch the bad guy and get their stuff back because they had a camera.
is the range measured in inches now?
I was excited for 802.11ac (now Wifi 5) when it first launched and I adopted it early but I've never been sold on the need for Wifi 6 let alone 7 now.
Unlike other folk in this thread I do thankfully have a Gigabit class internet connection but I now own my own home and so have been able to do some very basic Ethernet runs which totally replaces WiFi for 90% of my usage. My Wireless AP just talks to my phone, Steam Deck and a couple smart home gubbins really.
Latency for things like VR is seeming like one of the better improvements for 7.
I also hardwire my VR to my desktop which is hardwired to the internet.
Wireless can take a backseat
As much as I love being plugged into the internet, and definitely want to have the option to use a wire, I want to try wireless in VR - getting rid of the complications of being tethered by a cable seems likely to be worth the downsides.
While I'd love it, I don't think it has enough bandwidth to send a high quality image often enough to maintain a decent frame rate
Sure it does.
People don’t seem to understand that this isn’t really aimed at casual web browsing. It’s basically a wireless alternative to thunderbolt.
So take all of those crazy film cameras and data storage systems that rely on thunderbolt for decent performance… now get rid of the cable.
People are also missing that this extra bandwidth will help with mesh systems.
Not everyone is savvy enough, or has the ability to run Ethernet to every access point. The additional bandwidth here will help people who need better Wi-Fi, but are only going to buy an easy off the shelf solution
Eh. Even streaming media from a local server isn't really going to improve with this over current standards, at least not for me. I'm honestly not sure there's much need for it.
Really, I think we need to make better use of what we already have first, it feels like the more capacity and speed we get, the sloppier we get with anything resembling efficiency for any component. We're not getting better results for it, if anything it seems to be a net negative, everything seemed to run faster and better ten years ago with a fraction of the capabilities
This will be great for wireless PCVR, where bandwidth is a significant limiting factor even with WiFi 6
I mean, I'm not saying it doesn't have its uses, just... I dunno, for most use cases it just feels like solving a bloat issue by raising the capacity, which just leads to more bloat.
I'm not sure PCVR has enough useless or unoptimized overhead for my complaint to apply to it, but for most things, I think it's past time to stop throwing more resources at it and address the underlying problem.
Agile development.
(I'm kidding, but only a little bit honestly)
we definitely need to rethink agile and bring back good QA and requirements documentation. But yes with VR specifically, at the resolutions and framerates it requires, video signals must undergo costly and lossy compression to be transmitted wirelessly between PC and HMD, even with wifi 6 (though wifi 6 is much better than previous generations)
This is intended to be a wireless alternative to Thunderbolt. You’re probably not going to care about this unless you’re moving 4K RAW projects around on the reg.
Unfortunately routers with wan speeds above gigabit remain expensive. I would assume that will be the case until faster than gigabit internet reaches mainstream worldwide which will be a very long wait...
I can see companies trying to make wireless screens a thing again
Is it reliable enough for that? I suppose if you're streaming something, it's not a big deal because the display can buffer the video to avoid dropping frames when there's dropped packets. But interactive tasks would suffer from the latency involved in buffering. Bandwidth would need to be high enough to be able to compensate for dropped packets. Though I believe that as bandwidth increases, so do dropped wireless packets.
If it's one frame dropped per hour you won't notice. If it's one per minute it's going to be pretty annoying.
I pinged my router for an hour, I had only a few late packets and it's in another room behind a wall. If you ping the router in the same room, there should be no packet later than single milliseconds even with WiFi 5. You just don't have the bandwidth to support a high refresh rate uncompressed... yet
Can I get proper Linux drivers and kernel support for the Wi-Fi 7 card that came with my motherboard, please? Pretty please? I would really like to have Bluetooth and Wi-Fi would be a bonus. Stupid ath12k.