Next-gen Wi-Fi to trade ludicrous speed for the boring art of actually working Wi-Fi 8 is coming, but it looks set to focus on greater reliability rather than on pushing the bandwidth ever higher, as the most recent updates to the venerable wireless local network technology have done. It feels like we have had multiple wireless LAN updates in recent years, with Wi-Fi 6 only being officially adopted in …
Does that mean WiFi 8 will be referred to as "Plaid"?
For the average home user I don't see what the speed improvement is supposed to bring. I don't find a huge amount of difference between my Wifi 5 capable desktop and the elderly 2008-era HP laptop that is still using a WiFi 3 NIC for 99% of stuff I do online. The only time it's noticeable is media streaming above 720p (the laptop CPU can't cope with more than that anyway) or when running Discord with voice + screen share open.
"While these features individually might not make much of a difference, taken together they are expected to help ensure that Wi-Fi 8 actually delivers on the promises of better performance made by earlier releases."
While these features individually might be possible to implement, the overall system complexity means there is a gnat in hell's chance that they will all work together reliably.
Despite all the best intentions it will still stand or fall based on how the broadband suppliers configure the routers they supply since those will account for >90% of those in the wild. With the current standard of 'all use the same settings and turn the power up to 11 to punch the signal through' it does not bode well. With the new 'guaranteed signal' approach of having a repeater in every room this is making it all the more preferable to just flood-wire the home and leave wireless for people who deserve it like visitors and children
I will say this again and again: wifi 6 (ax) is more than enough for 99% of deployments, and deploying wifi 7 simply doesn't make financial sense. Most vendors are selling off their wifi 6 stock for cheap now, so keep an eye out!
Wifi 7 usually requires PoE++, and if you actually want to use the improved throughput you also need multi-gig links. This requires some pretty expensive switching gear, and for longer runs of cable cat6 might not even suffice, so you'd need to replace those too if you're unlucky.
What do you get? improved throughput, not much else really. And this is single-AP throughput, so unless it's a single room, you can just add another AP and call it a day...
If properly plan your channels and broadcast powers interference won't be an issue.
Of course there are some applications for the 6GHz band, and edge cases where the wifi 7 throughputs are justified, but the likelyhood of that both being the case and the additional expenses being worth it is very small.
Most issues are caused by improper configuration or insufficient capacity/coverage, and using a newer wifi standard is not going to solve that.
There's definitely a need for tech debt cleanup. WiFi remains buggy, glitchy, and dependent on who's implementing the hardware. A certain extremely opinionated gadget maker has decided that their way is right and it's not their fault when it doesn't work reliably with any existing access point.
The cost of wifi-7 gear - at least for consumer use - is prohibitive. For example Netgear sell a three-node mesh system for something in the order of £1600. That's just ludicrous, when a decent wifi-6 mesh can cost six times less!
Consumers, and small businesses, are going to get tired of the relentless upgrade cycle, that'll give them something they don't really need, like 1Gbps access speed on a paltry 30Mbps FTTC connection.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for progress, but it seems that no sooner do we upgrade our kit, there's some new shiny and unnecessary upgrade/replacement available. I know these things are backward compatible, but at what stage does having old kit just drag down the speed of your network, and the company/apartment downstairs?
Consumers might be tired of relentless upgrade cycles in respect of already-owned kit, but the main target for new standards will be ISPs who bundle routers. Yes, there might not be much need for Wifi 8, but as soon as it's a thing then the marketing departments of all the big ISPs will be shouting that their router now offers the latest and greatest wifi standard, guaranteeing the best performance. And marketing bluster works, which is why so many people pay more than they need to in response to the over-egged promises of outfits like EE and VirginMedia. Even with Wifi 7 not yet ratified several large ISPs are already marketing their services with a bundled Wifi 7 router.
I was just on the phone to my ISP. They are 'working on' WiFi 7 (and WPA3) and will be replacing the old gateways 'soon'. The last time that they were 'working on' something (WiFi 6) and would replace the old gateways 'soon' it took 18 months, so I'm not holding my breath waiting.
When they implement WPA3, things will be interesting.
I'd quite like some reliablity.. I have an Orbi Wifi 6 system, and my mobile devices don't necessarily connect to the nearest, and often fastest Wifi AP.. The other day, I was in my living room, and my streaming box was giving terrible performance (buffering every 20 seconds). When I ran a speed test on my mobile Wifi, it gave terrible speeds.. Looking at the admin website for the Orbis, both devices had connected to an access point in the next room, when the main Orbi router was sitting on a table in the same room. Rebooted the AP in the other room, forcing everything to disconnect, and the speed was fine.
Yes this is the major factor, and the reason why no one cares about Wifi 7 unless they have very specific environments where it will make a big difference - like conference centers, arenas or big factory floors. Office or especially home type environments won't see meaningful benefit from it. Without the mass market to support it, prices are going to remain high.
Wifi 6e is where it stops for the mass market, and really the only thing people want from it is the 6 GHz spectrum, because the 2.4 and 5 GHz have become crowded when there are a lot of independently managed APs in a small area (like an apartment building) so (for now at least) 6 GHz provides some relief.
Maybe what they really need is some sort of extension to 6E where unrelated APs can "talk" to each other and do a bit of coordination of frequency use and broadcast power levels. I suspect that would fix the ACTUAL problem that's causing people to think they need to upgrade their wifi or add mesh nodes.
The range at which you can successful decode a transmission is != the range where your transmissions affect your neighbors and theirs affect you. Doubly so if your AP responds to clients getting garbled packets by cranking its transmission power (made worse by lots of "instructions" on the web telling you how to increase your wifi power limits and supposedly solve your problems...until your neighbors read from the same playbook)
If you've ever noticed your wireless seems to work much better at 4am than it does at 7pm then you have encountered this.
Every "difficult" wifi setup I have worked on has issues with client density and a full spectrum. Hotels and big halls and lounges usually have to manage a lot of clients in a small space, and on top of it, they usually are located in places where there are a lot of other users crowding up the available spectrum.
We don't need more speed, we really need a much more efficient way of using the spectrum and we really need a way to avoid the collapse of the whole system when it's over a certain load (the same issue that plagues almost every system that time shares the same medium since thin ethernet).
So maybe wifi8 is a step in the right direction, even if we will have to wait for the wifi7 cow to have been utterly squeezed and milked to death before the new cow (I mean, new standard) becomes available on the market.
That's exactly the sort of use case that wifi 7 was primarily targeted at (yes it supported faster speeds and stuff and that's what most people hear about first but it is far better at chopping up the spectrum efficiently)
The problem is to get most of the benefits it offers you need the clients to be wifi 7, and when wifi 7 deployments are scarce there's been no hurry to adopt wifi 7. The latest iPhone has, and the latest Galaxy etc. But the lower cost phones aren't and probably won't for a while yet because it costs more and they don't see demand from consumers because wifi 7 deployments are so scarce. And even then you have to wait for a critical mass of people to upgrade their phones.
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After all Windows 10 never got support for even 6E, and you can't tell me that couldn't have been made to work if anyone wanted it to.
You uninstall the MS WiFi framework, and install a complete OEM WiFi framework. This was more common on WinXP. The problem isn't the drivers, it's the authentication services provided by the framework. There is no backward compatible mode for authentication at 6GHZ, so 6E is by specification is unusable without new authentication support, and old phones, laptops, and software will never be able to connect, even with a USB device.
On Win10, Intel drivers used the MS WiFi framework, so no support for 6E with Intel chipsets. I think at least one of the other companies was using a non-MS WiFi framework, and supported 6E on 10.
I have two cell phones: an iPhone 12 (4 years old) and an iPhone SE 2nd Gen (also 4 years old). Both support WiFi 6. My tablets, desktops, and laptop systems all support WiFi 6. My ISP supplied me with a gateway that supports WiFi 6. I looked at getting a 3rd-party router and extenders that supported WiFi 7, but the good ones were expensive, while the bad ones were very bad indeed, and as none of my hardware does WiFi 7, who cares... I might update the 12 to an iPhone 16. Maybe. That supports WiFi 7. I would not be putting in new wireless infrastructure to support one device. If/when additional devices support WiFi 7, I might move... or not. Maybe I'd prod the ISP and see if they had plans to release a new gateway. Or perhaps I'd just live with WiFi 6.
I note that the ISP allegedly delivers 3 Gb/s to my gateway (fibre to the gateway) but I don't see anywhere near that kind of performance, even when connected by Cat 6a Ethernet on the desktops and laptops. Definitely nowhere close wirelessly. Why, it's almost as if there's a lot of traffic and the overall speed depends on factors like that speed the node I'm connecting to can handle, and what speed various nodes between me and the target can handle, plus the usual wireless problems if using wireless.
WiFi 8 might be out in 2028. Or not. I suspect that by that time, I might be moving to WiFi 7. Maybe. If I had devices capable of WiFi 8 (hah!) and was certain of getting better speed (double hah!) I might consider going to WiFi 8 quickly. As is, I suspect that for me, WiFi 8 is at least five years away. Probably longer.
Why would you upgrade to wifi 7 just because your devices support it (when they do)
In a home you aren't going to max out wifi 6. Heck I'm still on 802.11ac later renamed wifi 5 and even though I have a shiny new iPhone 16 Pro Max that supports wifi 7 I feel zero need or desire to upgrade my wifi. It works great and its faster than my internet connection so what would be the point? I'll upgrade when my router craps out, or there is some sort of serious wifi security issue that's hardware related so updating DD-WRT/OpenWRT won't fix it.
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WiFi is what happens when marketing drives engineering. The wireless protocol itself is restricted to a relatively small number of frames per second due to the generous guard times needed to make the protocol work. Packing more data onto the frames then collides with common protocols like TCP that plaster communications with numbers of short frames (and our tendency to gobble bandwidth because of the needs of advertisers). This has always left the real world performance well short of what gets printed on the box and developments in the protocol have merely served as a form of "whack a mole" where trying to improve performance in one area invariably leads to problems in another. The solution to this problem has always been "more R/F bandwidth" -- WiFi was always crowded into two small slices of spectrum that were regarded as useless because the frequencies were absorbed by water molecules. So any real solution had to be political.
So why are we seeing talk of yet another update, when Wi-Fi 7 is still getting established and devices such as laptops that support older standards often have plenty of life left in them?
When a big-named manufacturer released their 802.11ac AP, I asked the Technical Product Manager why. His response was, "If I do not release this, I will be out of the job."
Everyone is releasing WiFix APs and if they do not follow suit, they'll be laughed at by Wall Street.
And just to make it more interesting with everyone, big-brand manufacturers aggressively enforce planned (or accelerated) obsolescence.
Meh - 10gb HBAs and CAT6 backbone with WiFi6 mesh for non intensive devices here and I can rarely see the router or switch break a sweat. We're far outstripping the capability of the (SSD) NAS to ship the data out as it is. Without some new bandwidth hog device/application coming on the scene I don't think even WiFi7 is going to be of any importance to the home user.
I'd like to remind everyone that WiFi isn't exclusively used in domestic environments. WiFi is/has become the default connection method in corporate environments. Companies are moving away from flood cabling buildigs and only installing the bare minimum for devices such as access points, BMS, etc. End users are expected to connect via WiFi.
In the modern data-heavy world, high wireless speed and reliable connections are imperative.
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