EE is working with Qualcomm to add Wi-Fi 7 to consumer broadband hubs

Really looking forward to better wifi for better wireless VR.

This article is completely inept. I'm nowhere near an expert in WiFi tech, but having done a lot of in-office WiFi setups over the past several years, it's easy to see the differences in quality generation over generation.

> Trouble is, the woes listed in the messaging are those that previous versions of services and wireless standards claimed to fix. If they didn't fix them, why should we believe this lot will? If they did, what is Qualcomm actually saying? It's a paradox.

Previous iterations of WiFi DID fix these problems. Modern "WiFi 6" is significantly better at handling many simultaneous clients than the old 802.11b/g were. We've been through multiple generational improvements to the old scheme, such as,

  - 802.11n using 5 GHz with lower penetration, making it easier to create more and smaller cells 
  - 802.11n introducing MIMO, leveraging airspace better 
  - 802.11ac introducing MU-MIMO, allowing simultaneous transmission for multiple clients 
  - 802.11ax expanding MU-MIMO into the frequency domain, making it more effective 
  - Much better and quicker channel reuse during potential collisions
  - Quicker transmission means the time slices clients DO get are more meaningful

WiFi has gotten so much better over the past several years, that I suspect people just don't remember how unreliable it was before. Part of this is because it's been a gradual improvement, as new standards have come out, on-market hardware has slowly taken up these new features, and client devices need to be aged out and replaced before a newer device can make use of these newer features -- which users might just attribute to their new device being "better", and not that the WiFi got better.

It's not hard to look at the WiFi 7 (802.11be) Wikipedia page and see that it offers several improvements to handle increased client load,

  - Multi-Access Point (AP) Coordination (e.g. coordinated and joint transmission)
  - Enhanced link adaptation and retransmission protocol (e.g. Hybrid Automatic Repeat Request (HARQ))
  - Enhanced resource allocation in OFDMA
  - Optimized channel sounding that requires less airtime
  - Implicit channel sounding
  - Support of direct links, managed by an access point

> There is no consumer problem of today, no domestic use case imaginable, where 50Gbps works where 10 will not.

WiFi quality is not dictated by the advertised transmission rate. That's just the number hardware vendors love to advertise, because it keeps getting bigger and bigger generation-on-generation, whereas all these other improvements are much more nuanced and tough to communicate in marketing copy.

> The 6GHz band, which in the US actually goes some way beyond 7GHz, is more easily blocked by walls and other physical stuff necessary for gracious living than 5GHz, so coverage problems won't be fixed.

Which may actually be desirable. Less penetration through walls means smaller cells that don't interfere (need to share airspace) with as many neighbors. This has been a boon in dense settings (office buildings, apartment buildings, public WiFi) during the 2.4 GHz -> 5 GHz transition.

If you have a large house with many walls separating each room, you may now need more APs to cover the same area. But looking at the proliferation of mesh-based systems, it seems the market is already moving that way anyway.

> It would be amazing if one in a hundred households notice an iota of difference if their current router magically sprouted Wi-Fi 7, and this won't change much for the years it takes to get phones, laptops, and everything else with older versions of the standard upgraded. Good luck getting those managed end-to-end services up and running too.

And this is just uselessly defeatist. My current devices don't support the new standard, so why bother? WiFi has seen tremendous advances in quality and capability over the past 15 years, and users have always realized those advances as their devices age out. Back in the 802.11g days, it would've been unheard of to have multiple TVs and iPads in a single apartment within a densely populated apartment building streaming 4K video over WiFi simultaneously.

650 Mbps is a very good result for Wi-Fi 6. 2x2 MIMO and 80 MHz channel yields a link rate of 1200 Mbps. Throughput of half the link rate is typical. iPhones don't support 4x4 MIMO or 160 MHz wide channels needed to go significantly faster (2400 Mbps with one enabled or 4800 Mbps with both features).

IMHO, if you can string a copper wire for power (and POTS) you can string a fibre. It's just a matter of us deciding to wire things up like was done in the 20th century.

Yes Daviey, those of use using a telephone in the traditional way are a diminishing number. Hence passively becoming eccentric... Not as much as the person riding a penny farthing but slowly heading that way.

To the other questions in the UK yes you can move your landline telephone number to a third party open standard sipp voip service, but setting up a voip adapter to pretend to be a landline is fiddly for many and migrating a landline telephone number, while it can be done, is not a nice process in practice. If you have an openreach ont with a telephone socket built in don't expect it to do anything in the future. The industry went another way. If you wish to carry on plugging in a telephone to your landline without any configuration then you will have to start using the telephone socket on your wifi router and only the router provided by your isp. (With some exceptions). Though most people won't care because they just use their mobiles now...