It’s Time to Upgrade the Home and Office with Wi-Fi 7 and Fibre

In-building connectivity has long been a problem, but two new technologies can help: Wi-Fi 7 and fibre to the room (FTTR). Ensuring a fast broadband connection in every room is becoming more pressing as the number and needs of in-home devices rapidly increases. Mobile phones, PCs and tablets are now joined by smartwatches, ever more-demanding streaming boxes and a proliferation of smart home and internet of things devices. Each device is competing for an adequate share of the in-building network. This internal network is now often the bottleneck and not the broadband connection into the home or office.

Rising broadband speeds are shining a new light on in-building connectivity weaknesses. Fibre is increasingly commonplace. Early gigabit passive optical network (GPON) solutions that offered up to 1 Gbps symmetric speeds are being superseded by XG-PON fibre installations that, in time, will offer up to 10 Gbps.

Existing in-building networks face many challenges. Many homes and offices lack any wired connectivity, and a single Wi-Fi access point can struggle to reach all areas. Even with a Wi-Fi mesh system, the Wi-Fi connection between mesh access points is often too weak to penetrate walls with a good performance.

Installing cabling into an existing building is usually difficult. But even if there’s an existing wired network, there’s a good chance it lacks the capability to support modern broadband speeds. Older Ethernet Cat 5 cabling can only support 100 Mbps. Even if existing Ethernet cables are the popular Cat 5e standard, they’ll be limited to a maximum of 1 Gbps — now slower than the latest speeds offered by most fixed broadband operators.

Fixed broadband operators have long struggled to ensure customers can use broadband throughout the home or office, even before these latest jumps in broadband speeds. For this reason, operators often provide their own customer premises equipment that includes a Wi-Fi mesh approach.

Wi-Fi 7 offers an immediate benefit, even if customers don’t yet have any Wi-Fi 7-capable devices in their home or office. This is because Wi-Fi 7 connections can vastly improve the mesh connections between Wi-Fi access points as Wi-Fi 7 can combine different types of unlicensed spectrum together with multilink operation — for example, 5 GHz and 2.4 GHz or 5 GHz and 6 GHz — to boost speeds. Even if there’s a wired network available, a good Wi-Fi signal remains essential so smartphones, smartwatches and devices that aren’t near a wired network socket can still connect.

Devices that already support Wi-Fi 7, such as recent smartphones and PCs, can enjoy faster speeds because Wi-Fi 7 supports wider channel sizes. In essence, more spectrum can be connected to a device. Although 160 MHz channels are common with Wi-Fi 7, up from typical 80 MHz channels, some devices offer support for channels closer to the Wi-Fi 7 maximum. For example, ZTE’s LinkPro series has three models with support for 240 MHz channels in the 5 GHz band, which ZTE claims supports speeds up to 14 Gbps. The maximum channel size is 320 MHz.

The ideal approach is to have both a wired and Wi-Fi network. The wired network will offer superior performance, be more future-proof as broadband speeds rise and improve the performance of the Wi-Fi network by connecting each Wi-Fi access point — rather than relying on wireless connections to link together the access points.

If a new wired network is being installed, then companies should use a future-proof solution. FTTR has the greatest headroom because it’ll be able to scale to 10 Gbps and beyond, most likely up to at least 100 Gbps. Because it’s an optical network, FTTR also avoids the problem of interference from power cables that can arise on a coaxial cable or Ethernet network. While shielded Ethernet cables exist, they tend to be bulkier and therefore more difficult to install.

The other advantage of FTTR is that it guarantees consistent performance anywhere a fibre client device connects — something even the latest Wi-Fi 7 equipment can’t deliver absolutely everywhere inside a building. Already, most streaming services offer 4K resolutions, also called UHD, that considerably increase broadband speed requirements. Similarly, high-dynamic range HDR television also increases bandwidth needs.

In time, streaming will move to 8K and beyond. So, some streaming set-top-box (STB) providers now offer an optical connection, such as ZTE’s 4K Fiber Combo STB. ZTE has also launched an integrated 4K streaming STB and a voice-controlled soundbar. Alongside these products, ZTE has cooperated with partners to offer a streaming TV with cloud games, free ad-supported channels, targeted ads and an AI fitness solution.

The fast, consistent connection of FTTR is a platform for cloud gaming and other services, offering new potential revenue streams for internet service providers. However, the performance available with a good Wi-Fi 7 signal will usually be good enough for 4K streams — the problem is ensuring that the Wi-Fi signal is strong enough everywhere in the building where there’s a TV and streaming box, and that’s where a fast wired network, such as FTTR, still shines.

In September 2024, ZTE launched a suite of FTTR products that highlight the capabilities of an in-building fibre network. The network products support a 2.5G optical network alongside Wi-Fi 7 — for connecting mobile devices — in a mesh system with ZTE’s D-WLAN architecture, which it claims offers latency as low as 10 milliseconds and can increase wireless throughput by 10%. D-WLAN coordinates multiple access points to maximize throughput and coverage.

Alongside the innovative support for optical network capability, ZTE includes support for network attached storage. The on-board AI-capable silicon can use wireless sensing to differentiate between people and different types of object. The portfolio also includes smart home devices with integrated screens and voice control.