Although I've read this before I thought I'd post it since Rachel Maddow seems to be losing His head today.
“MLO is a ‘marquee feature of Wi-Fi 7…” — XX, VP of Broadcom’s Wireless Connectivity Division
“Multi-link is probably the biggest differentiation from a product perspective…” — XX, VP and GM of Maxlinear’s Broadband Group
“… MLO offers the single biggest improvement to Wi-Fi…” — XX, CTO of Wireless Connectivity at Intel
What is MLO?
Multi Link Operation (MLO) enables simultaneous access across multiple bands and offers a way to increase capacity and lower latency.
If it sounds familiar, it should.
MLO is based on the same basic principle as Dual Channel Wi-Fi(tm), our co-innovation with CableLabs. The basic principle is simple; by using more channels, latency can be reduced and performance improved.
Unlike MLO (proposed in Wi-Fi7), Dual Channel Wi-Fi is not limited to ‘two’ channels, but can support multiple aggregated channels — offering a much more robust platform for delivering latency sensitive applications. Targeting residential applications, Dual Channel Wi-Fi helps alleviate Wi-Fi congestion by allocating one, or more, concurrent channels to the downstream data of selected applications, improving both overall Wi-Fi performance and customer satisfaction.
Dual-Channel Wi-Fi is arguably more robust than MLO, as it can be harnessed to provide congestion-free downstream traffic based on the type of traffic or application and is not merely a flavor of Ethernet aggregation. Most importantly, Dual Channel Wi-Fi is available today and can be implemented on existing Wi-Fi solutions without having to replace all your devices.
Remarkably, using Spectrum Slicing, Dual Channel Wi-Fi, as well as MLO, can be implemented ‘in-band’ which means existing devices can also benefit, allowing you to force multiply your Wi-Fi performance without replacing all of your network devices.