Why Samsung’s Wi-Fi 7 move is a big deal

Samsung unveiled the Galaxy S24 range last week, and the highest-specced Galaxy S24 Ultra features Wi-Fi 7 technology.

While access to Wi-Fi 7 technology is extremely limited for now, with the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers only expected to deliver final approval in mid-2024, the move means Samsung has essentially future-proofed the Galaxy S24 Ultra.

The Samsung Galaxy Z Fold5 also features Wi-Fi 7 capabilities, making it and the S24 Ultra the only smartphones officially sold in South Africa to offer the technology.

Those who buy a Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra won’t be able to use the Wi-Fi 7 capabilities yet, with the Wi-Fi Alliance announcing that it had just begun certifying Wi-Fi 7 devices at the Consumer Electronics Show 2024.

Only two consumer-grade Wi-Fi 7 routers are currently available — the TP-Link Deco BE85 mesh and Archer BE800. In South Africa, they are priced at R23,999 and R13,499, respectively.

The pricing and availability of these Wi-Fi 7-capable routers suggest it could be a while before the technology is widely adopted in South Africa.

It should be noted that several smartphone manufacturers make devices featuring Wi-Fi 7 technology. However, they aren’t shipped directly to South Africa. These include:

• Asus ROG Phone 8 Pro
• Google Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro
• OnePlus 12
• Xiaomi Redmi K70 and K70 Pro
• Xiaomi 13T and 13T Pro
• ZTE Nubia Red Magic 9 Pro and 9 Pro+
• Vivo iQOO 12 and 12 Pro

Therefore, the Galaxy S24 Ultra is the only smartphone officially sold in South Africa to feature Wi-Fi 7 technology.

Samsung’s future-proofing goes further than just the latest Wi-Fi technology.

The company also announced that it will offer seven years of security and Android updates with the Galaxy S24 series, bringing it more in line with Google’s Pixel 8 promise and Apple’s consistent updates.

It marks a significant jump from the five years of security and four years of Android updates offered with last year’s Galaxy S23 series.

What Wi-Fi 7 means for speeds

MediaTek first demonstrated Wi-Fi 7 in January 2022, and the technology promises speeds up to 2.4x faster than Wi-Fi 6.

Wi-Fi 7 uses 320MHz channels — up from 160MHz in Wi-Fi 6 — which doubles the maximum bandwidth and supports 4K quadrature amplitude modulation technology, making it possible to achieve throughput speeds of at least 30Gbps.

According to Intel, a “typical” Wi-Fi 7-enabled laptop could hit a theoretical maximum of nearly 5.8Gbps

“This is 2.4x faster than the 2.4Gbps possible with Wi-Fi 6/6E and could easily enable high quality 8K video streaming or reduce a massive 15 GB file download to roughly 25 seconds,” says Intel.

Wi-Fi 7 also supports merging bands into a single connection through Multi-Link Operation, enabling devices to send and receive data across different frequency bands and channels simultaneously.

Theoretically, if you can download a file at 1Gbps on the 6Ghz band and 500Mbps on 5GHz, combining the two bands will result in a download speed of 1.5Gbps.

According to TP-Link, Connecting to the 2.4GHz, 5GHz, and 6GHz bands simultaneously increases throughput, reduces latency, and improves reliability.

The new technology also doubles the Multi-User multiple-input and multiple-output (MU-MIMO) spatial streams at 16 x 16 MU-MIMO.

For reference, Wi-Fi 6 supports up to 8 x 8 MU-MIMO. However, it should be noted that consumer-grade Wi-Fi 6 and 6e routers generally offer only 4 x 4 MU-MIMO.

Therefore, consumer-grade Wi-Fi 7 routers may also offer only a fraction of the MU-MIMO capabilities of the technology.

Currently, it is also hard to find phones and laptops that do better than 2 x 2 MU-MIMO.