Leading the Development of the Wi-Fi 7 Industry, Huawei High-Quality Wi-Fi 7 Wins (2024)

Huawei announced that it has won the "Best Enterprise Wi-Fi Network 2023" Award at the Wireless Broadband Alliance (WBA) Industry Awards 2023 for its field-proven High-quality AirEngine Wi-Fi 7 Network Solution. This is the first time that a Wi-Fi 7 vendor has won the award, which is a testament to how well Huawei AirEngine Wi-Fi 7 APs have been received by global enterprise users. As one of the most coveted and prestigious awards in the Wi-Fi industry, the "Best Enterprise Wi-Fi Network 2023" Award from the WBA is the culmination of Huawei's decades of investment in WLAN. In line with the "Wireless First" strategy, Huawei continues to explore and optimize key WLAN features — such as wireless network coverage, terminal roaming, user experience assurance, and visualized O&M — promoting WLAN as the preferred network access mode for enterprises.

Committed to advancing WLAN standards, Huawei ranks No. 1 in cumulative contributions to WLAN standards and Wi-Fi 7 standards, making significant contributions to Wi-Fi 7 commercial deployment. Huawei is the world's first vendor to launch an enterprise Wi-Fi solution. Since its launch in 2023, the Wi-Fi 7 solution has been recognized by countless customers. At the time of this press release, hundreds of them have expressed strong willingness to purchase the solution, more than 100 are testing the solution, and over 30 have placed orders to deploy it (including well-known universities, public departments, and carriers). In particular, Shenzhen Talent Institute and Southwest Jiaotong University have jointly publicized a success case with Huawei Wi-Fi 7. As predicted by International Data Corporation (IDC), Wi-Fi 7 will see rapid deployment in the next 4 critical years. By 2027, Wi-Fi 7 will account for 65% of the global network.

Huawei enterprise Wi-Fi 7 products have won over enterprise customers with their excellent performance, optimal experience, and high reliability. According to the test report Huawei AirEngine Wi-Fi 6/Wi-Fi 7 WLAN Access Point Performance Evaluation and Function Validation published by Tolly in August 2023, the download speed of a single Huawei Wi-Fi 7 AP reaches 4.3 Gbps, with the average latency as low as 2 ms. With such speeds, a gigabit file can be downloaded in just 2 seconds, less than the time to take a single breath.

Figure 1: single-terminal speed from the Tolly Wi-Fi 7 test report

How does Huawei Wi-Fi 7 achieve such high performance? Unlike Wi-Fi 6, Wi-Fi 7 supports the new 6 GHz frequency band, increasing the frequency bandwidth from 160 MHz to 320 MHz. In terms of coding efficiency, the modulation mode is increased from 1024-QAM to 4096-QAM. And when it comes to carrier utilization, Wi-Fi 7 allows a terminal to use multiple frequency bands such as 2.4 GHz, 5 GHz, and 6 GHz at the same time. With these new technologies, Huawei AirEngine 8771-X1T supports a theoretical bandwidth of up to 18.67 Gbps. According to the Tolly test report, the actual throughput of the AP can reach 13.25 Gbps. In addition, Huawei's unique dynamic-zoom smart antenna technology is used to adjust the coverage mode (high-density or omnidirectional), so that radio coverage is optimized to improve user access signal quality, further enhancing user access performance and experience.

Figure 2: AP throughput from the Tolly Wi-Fi 7 test report

Video conferencing is increasing, now accounting for 80% of campus traffic. However, video freezing often occurs, which affects the user experience. As part of Huawei's high-quality 10 Gbps campus video conferencing assurance solution, Huawei AirEngine Wi-Fi 7 introduces the intelligent multimedia scheduling algorithm. This algorithm can control uplink congestion to provide latency guarantee, and also schedule the downlink video service by dynamically adjusting Wi-Fi Multimedia (WMM) parameters and optimizing the video service slicing ratio, thereby improving video service experience.

Figure 3: Example of the slice ratio setting for Huawei WLAN products

In continuous WLAN cellular networking, APs may operate on the same channel, leading to severe interference, especially in high-density scenarios. As a result, the actual rate cannot reach the expected value, which adversely affects the wireless office experience. Huawei's Wi-Fi 7 solution uses the joint resource scheduling among APs from the dimensions of space, time, and frequency to enable interference adaptation in the whole area. This helps to achieve continuous broadband networking and stable experience in high-density office scenarios. The key technologies are as follows:

• Coordinated Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (Co-OFDMA) and Coordinated Spatial Reuse (CoSR) technologies are used to adjust anti-interference parameters on a packet-by-packet basis and finally achieve packet-level AP interference coordination.

• Restricted Target Wake Time (R-TWT) and Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) scheduling between APs, and terminal-coordinated interference suppression are used to enable inter-AP uplink interference coordination.

• AI technology is used to analyze the interference spectrum and dynamically adjust the hybrid networking of 40+80 MHz and 80+160 MHz, to achieve dynamic broadband networking.

As enterprises accelerate digital transformation, security has become a major concern. On the air interface side, Huawei's Wi-Fi 7 solution supports signal hiding and the latest WPA3, which greatly improve the encryption capability and increase the cracking difficulty. On the wired side, Huawei's Wi-Fi 7 solution supports MACsec encryption. It works with Huawei high-quality 10 Gbps campus switches to achieve end-to-end MACsec encryption, greatly improving packet transmission security.

The innovative Wi-Fi 7 technology allows customers to enjoy the ultimate experience. Mr. Chen Runlin, Information Department of Shenzhen Talent Institute, said, "To improve the Internet access experience for users and provide Wi-Fi services with higher speed, lower latency, and more secure connections, we launched an upgrade plan with Huawei's Wi-Fi 7 solution. By deploying the Wi-Fi 7 network, guests can enjoy double the bandwidth, with the number of concurrent terminals also doubling."

Huawei will continue to innovate Wi-Fi 7 products to meet people's requirements for Wi-Fi 7 in different scenarios, environments and applications, with its high-quality 10 Gbps campus network solution. The "Best Enterprise Wi-Fi Network" award from the WBA is a testament to the achievements of Huawei's Wi-Fi 7 solution, as well as a driving force for future Wi-Fi 7 solution innovation. Going forward, Huawei Wi-Fi 7 will continuously innovate to improve user experience, performance, and security capabilities. This will enable Huawei to build high-quality 10 Gbps campus networks for enterprises.

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