The global rollout of Wi-Fi 7 gear is continuing to pick up momentum.

Today Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) announced its new HPE Aruba 730 Series Campus Wi-Fi 7 wireless access points, offering the promise of more capacity than ever before.

It's still early days for Wi-Fi 7, it was only in January that the Wi-Fi Alliance announced its official certification program for the new wireless standard. As has been the case with each prior generation of Wi-Fi, Wi-Fi 7 offers the promise of more bandwidth and capacity for wireless users. Looking beyond the capabilities that the Wi-Fi 7 standard provides, HPE claims that its 730 Series APs provide up to a 30% boost in wireless capacity over competitor offerings.

HPE aims to make the 730 Series APs an anchor point for enterprises deploying AI, IoT and other data-intensive edge applications that require secure, high-performance connectivity.

“Like with previous generations of Wi-Fi, we have had interest from our customers who are looking to embrace the latest technology,” Stuart Strickland, wireless chief technology officer, HPE Aruba Networking, told SDxCentral. “More importantly, what’s attracting customers to our Wi-Fi APs are the additional capabilities that go beyond the standard.”

At the heart of the capacity gains is HPE's patented ultra tri-band (UTB) filtering technology. UTB allows the 5GHz and 6GHz bands to operate concurrently without interference, taking full advantage of Wi-Fi 7's multi-gigabit capabilities.

The 730 Series is also designed as an IoT connectivity hub. The APs include native support for Zigbee, Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) and have dual USB ports to connect a wide range of IoT sensors and devices. Importantly, the APs pack double the memory and flash storage of previous HPE Aruba Wi-Fi 6E models. This enables them to run containerized applications and process data locally from IoT devices like cameras and environmental sensors, rather than sending all that data to the cloud or data center.

“HPE Aruba Networking believes the Wi-Fi 7 is table stakes when it comes to helping meet customers’ needs,” Strickland said. “We’re continuing our history of leadership with our new Wi-Fi 7 APs, continuing our product philosophy of having our APs do a lot more than just route traffic.”

He also noted that on the app side, more immersive, real time apps are demanding more of Wi-Fi, and more services are becoming more location-aware.

Security is a core focus of the HPE Aruba 730 series.

Strickland noted that the new APs support role-based dynamic segmentation, client inspection to detect rogue IoT devices, and now, MACsec security extended to the wireless edge. MACsec (Media Access Control security)is a network security standard that has been widely used for wired switching gear, MACsec is designed to secure all traffic on Ethernet links between two points, typically between switches or routers, or between a switch and a host device.

“For the first time, we’re taking MACsec encryption that is available for switching and making it available for wireless,” Strickland said. “The growth of unsecured IoT devices is a big driver for customers needing to make upgrades in security to ensure Zero Trust at the wireless edge.”

A key challenge with the adoption of any new Wi-Fi standard is the availability of client devices.  Currently there are few if any consumer notebook or mobile devices that support Wi-Fi 7, though that will likely change over time.

“From our perspective, we’ve added new capabilities to our new APs to make it more about supporting enterprise needs than simply moving to the next standard,” Strickland said.

In this case, he argued that the greatest single benefit of Wi-Fi 7 is its support for the 6 GHz band. In that regard he noted that HPE Aruba has a head start with a robust and growing ecosystem of Wi-Fi 6E-capable clients which will drive adoption for many organizations that had not already moved to 6E.

Strickland also emphasized that while client adoption will factor into upgrading to a new standard, it is not the major factor. Most organizations will upgrade based on their refresh cycles and will want to go to the latest standard that will support them for the next 5 or so years.

“It is also the beauty of the Wi-Fi standard that all new infrastructure is always backward compatible with every previous generation of Wi-Fi clients and ready for an emerging ecosystem of new clients,” he said.