𝗧𝗼𝗮𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗿 *𝑣𝑒𝑟𝑦 𝑝𝑢𝑠ℎ𝑒𝑑 𝑑𝑜𝑤𝑛Wi-Fi 7 Signals the Industry’s New Priority: Stability
0x0The renewed focus on reliability is motivated by emerging applications. Imagine a wireless factory robot in a situation where a worker suddenly steps in front of it and the robot needs to make an immediate decision.
This example is a real WTF. I really hope nobody is planning on building safety-critical real-time systems on top of WiFi!
If your robot moves around, then it needs a wireless connection. And it doesn’t really get any more reliable than wifi. I’m certainly not going to outsource that to Verizon or use Bluetooth.
And even for things that can be wired - ethernet is far from reliable. Cables are easily damaged or simply unplugged.
As someone using various wireless standards over over twenty years and in IT dealing with wifi instability on basically a daily basis. No.
Wifi is a series of compromises to be convenient. It’s “good enough” for most of those but generally and increasingly in newer standards, the compromise is to drop stability for things speed. You’ll see this to be the case in a lot of professional wifi gear that will transfer you to a lower standard if it sees weaker signals to improve stability.
To make that concrete, a problem with wifi in an office is an embarrassing “I’ll call back on my phone” but a factory floor that could be millions of dollars of downtime to restart an entire chain of machines. Hardened industrial wiring and connections is well established and wifi is just not at that level. The poorly formed example of the robot was trying to convey their intention to start addressing that level of hardening.
All that said, based on my experience reading ieee articles this is all exaggerated. in reality we’re probably just getting more stable video calls at higher bandwidths. Still a win for the help desk techs everywhere and people with a heavy wall making Netflix flaky.