Low Latency, Jitter Are Reasons to Move to Wi-Fi 7 'Fast': CommScope Exec

Anyone looking for 6 GHz Wi-Fi hardware this year should buy 6E because it’s “far better” than a standard dual-band 2.4- or 5-GHz device, said Charles Cheevers, CommScope chief accounting officer, on Parks Associates’ virtual Connection conference Thursday. Service providers that don’t have a design in place for a new gateway, extender or retail product should skip to Wi-Fi 7 for the next iteration, he said.

Cheevers sees Wi-Fi 7 products hitting retail this year on the access point and client side, with 2023 as the “landing spot” for Wi-Fi gear and 2024 the “opening up of real volume production.” That will put a squeeze on Wi-Fi 6E, which he deemed a “shorter-lived technology” that hasn’t been helped by chip shortages.

“There’s a real reason to move to 7 fast,” Cheevers said, citing features that will enable new latency-sensitive and capacity-sensitive services. “That’s what’s missing today,” Cheevers said, noting that in multi-dwelling units, even with mesh networks, latency and jitter can be “anywhere between 10 milliseconds in Wi-Fi in one instance and 400 in the next.” The goal in the 6 GHz band is to maintain single-digit latency and jitter “and even get down to 2 ms,” he said.

Network capacity is important for future services, but Wi-Fi 6E and 7 are focused on getting rid of latency and jitter “because that is the bottleneck for a lot of the future stuff that we’re trying to do,” said Cheevers.

The spectrum available in 6 GHz will make it possible to “peel off specific applications" with specific resource units "dedicated to them, like gaming,” with high-bandwidth, low-jitter needs, or specific applications like security that can have its own “trunk” or channel, said Cheevers. “That’s the big paradigm shift” that 6 GHz Wi-Fi brings, he said: “It’s latency/jitter-driven and specific service-driven Wi-Fi that we haven’t had before.”

CommScope is on board with the Matter protocol that’s in development, said Cheevers. “Everybody in the industry seems to agree that for too long we were developing protocols for IoT and applications that were struggling to connect" to devices, he said. For providers supplying a device in the home now, adding Matter capability “is a positive thing,” he said, assuming it has “the right security.” CommScope is hopeful Matter will bring about convergence, making single-application functions across multiple devices "work much better for consumers,” he said.

The networking company’s mission has been to “encourage the ability to create Matterized hub points” so someone with an extender, access point or set-top box can participate in a Matter network and be able to “facilitate the onboarding to Matter applications,” said Cheevers. Those can be single applications provided by a vendor or a service provider that presents “some of the features of all of the devices, but not all of them,” he said. Simple functions such as opening or locking a smart door lock would be a standard function, he said. A premium upgrade would be the prerogative of the smart lockmaker to enable, for example, a one-time pass to the Amazon delivery driver to drop off a package inside the home, he said.

Being able to add simple features to one common app has always been where consumers have wanted the smart home to take them, and CommScope agrees, said Cheevers. Consumers should be able to “work their own Matter hub into different end devices using simple open/close door, turn on/turn off lights” functionality, he said. “Then the app providers that provide the suite of full applications for those devices can include one-time use of the door lock, or whatever” as a step-up feature, he said.

CommScope is “invested” in putting Wi-Fi sensing in its devices to enable motion detection, gesture recognition and biometric measurement, Cheevers said. Wi-Fi Sensing works best with more devices involved, he said: “If you have every room with lots of Wi-Fi clients,” Wi-Fi sensing enables detection of breathing and limb movement. Cheevers described Wi-Fi sensing as a “software-overlay onto devices” with a low-duty cycle within Wi-Fi access points that keeps it from affecting Wi-Fi performance.

Wi-Fi sensing is a “key technology, but it has to be part of an overall system,” Cheevers said. It could be used to sense motion using Wi-Fi, but “if you’re trying to do it to detect someone falling, that’s a hard problem to solve,” he said. It may need to be supplemented with an overlay application to reach the person who has fallen with an audio stream or to open a camera link, he said.

Those types of applications are being built, said Cheevers. “The more you’re able to investigate the home through Wi-Fi sensing and figure out applications -- from falling to telemedicine to aging in place -- the more there’s parallel requirements to make them user friendly,” he said. A network of Wi-Fi sensing solutions could combine in-room radar, in-room video, and contact sensors for open and close functions, he said:. “You can build really good applications of aging in place monitoring, or just security applications for the home if you’re not there.”