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The Vanguard

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Wi-Fi faster than fibre optics? A new record has been broken

ByRita Wright

Nov 9, 2023
Wi-Fi faster than fibre optics? A new record has been broken

Is Wi-Fi faster than the highest speeds offered by our Internet packages in France? The information comes straight from Huawei’s laboratories in the United States. The Chinese giant has carried out its first Wi-Fi 7 performance tests. The result: a router capable of sending 13 Gb/s, up to 4.33 Gb/s with a single device. All this with a latency of just 2 ms.

How to achieve such speed?

Huawei has brought together all the new features of Wi-Fi 7 to achieve such record speeds, starting with the three frequency bands 2.4 GHz, 5 GHz and 6 GHz. There’s also an increase in channel width from 160 MHz to 320 MHz.

We can also imagine that the brand had to integrate a particularly powerful processor to process the 13 gigabits of data per second in real time.

Note that Wi-Fi 7 promises to eventually reach a speed of 23 Gb/s.

What’s the point?

Given that the record speeds achieved by Huawei here far exceed those of an Internet connection, one might well ask what the point of such a novelty is. The answer lies in the local network. A data rate like this means that the devices in your home will be able to communicate at very high speeds.

We can imagine, for example, broadcasting a video stored on a NAS to the TV. Or streaming a video game from a game console or PC to the TV, without the need for a cloud gaming service or HDMI cable.

In truth, Wi-Fi 7 is primarily intended for corporate use, with the need for larger simultaneous connections and very specific uses such as the management and maintenance of industrial machinery.