Coming Wi-Fi 8 will bring reliability rather than greater speed

Wi-Fi 8 will be a step change in connectivity, if Intel can be believed, and will be able to adapt intelligently to local conditions to deliver a reliable service without the slowdowns users often experience when the network is congested. The next-gen release of Wi-Fi is not expected to be available in devices for a couple of …

[BOFH in Training]

WAN speed anyone?

" everyone will have massive amounts of compute and storage available to them over the network" ?

So, does that mean that internet speed will get an upgrade?

What's the use of everyone getting "massive compute / storage" over the network when your connection to the internet which holds those resources is limited?

Unless he is thinking everyone has that in the local LAN?

On another note, I am on 1gbps symmetric fibre connection, and it costs me less than USD 35 to get a 10gbps symmetric connection (just that I don't feel the need to spend an extra 10 bucks a month when the 1gbps works fine for me to push many TB a month). If the average person can't access such speeds cheaply, it kind of defeats the purpose of WAN based resources.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: WAN speed anyone?

My isp throttles my bandwidth after a few Tb (“unlimited fibre”) , another bottle neck

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: WAN speed anyone?

WiFi org can't help you with internet speed. You will need to ask your ISP for that. Or, if you have money, time and skills, order dark fibre connection to your house, buy bgp capable router and sign peering agreements with a few peering providers or internet exchanges to minimize number of hops. That way you can have 100 Gbit/s available to your house.

[eldakka]

Re: WAN speed anyone?

Selective and misleading quoting, the full quote says (emphasis mine):

Cordeiro says that Intel sees Wi-Fi 8 as the "connective technology for the AI era," one where in the not-too-distant future, everyone will have massive amounts of compute and storage available to them over the network, and this means that you can't allow the wireless connection to become the bottleneck to accessing all those resources.

The goal is to prevent WiFi from being the bottleneck in the coming years if/when Internet connectivity speeds improve.

1 Gbps allows good connectivity to that compute on the WAN/Internet. However, for some reason most people seem to equate LAN with WiFi because most people seem to use WiFi rather than cabled LAN. How often do you see instructions that say "to connect this thing to your network, go to your WiFi router ...." - the assumption being that you are using WiFi. The upshot is that it seems most people use WiFi as the standard connectivity between their devices and their LAN and out to the wider WAN/Internet. Therefore the WiFi bottleneck becomes a serious constraint when you consider it's seeming to becoming the standard LAN setup (not sure why, I use CAT5/6 for most of my computers, WiFi is a convenience for say phones or when I/m wandering around the house with a lapttop - couch to kitchen to porch to bed, but once I 'settle' in somewhere I'll plug in a network cable). Therefore improving reliability of WiFi is a reasonable goal to me (despite for me WiFi is a fallback, not the main connectivity method, but I understand that how I do things isn't the way others do things and I may now be in a fading minority who prefers cabled connections).

The other thing you are missing is that many corporates are starting to use WiFi much more. My work (~15000 people) recently went to hotdesking and assigning everyone laptops. And the default/expected connectivity is using the corporate WiFi. Sure, you can plug in the network patch the replaced desktops use(ed) - and I try to do this where relatively easy - but I've found many hotdesks haven't bothered to plug the dock into the LAN, they all seem happy using the corporate WiFi rather than cabled. And many corporates have better than your 1Gbps connectivity to the internet, and that's not even mentioning the multiple multi-gigabit connections to our datacentres and their mainframes and server farms.

[BOFH in Training]

Re: WAN speed anyone?

Wifi has stopped being a bottleneck to the internet for many people since 802.11n (around year 2009) was out. I think 802.11n is supposedly capable of about 500mbps.

I know many people who are barely on 100mbps net connection (even that is asymmetric). I know many people who are behind CGNAT, with not even an IPV6 as a public IP.

I think the slowest I have seen recently during my travels is 10mbps (on a good day).

Not everyone has access to decent 5G(or even 4G) to use that for home internet access.

So if anyone mentions computing resources / storage / anything that needs a decent connection to the internet, I assume they are clueless. Not everyone has a cheap 1gbps or 10 gbps connection (am lucky in that sense), but I think majority are not.

[ITMA]

Re: WAN speed anyone?

"Wifi has stopped being a bottleneck to the internet for many people"

But for a great many others, their complaint of "the internet is playing up" is actually crap WiFi.

Doesn't matter how great the theoretical speed WiFi can deliver, situations where you have 30+ other WiFi access points in relatively close proximity (not uncommon in blocks of flats etc) can absolutely cripple it.

WiFi fixes one and only one problem - not being able to use a cable. If you can use a cable, do so.

[Excused Boots]

Re: WAN speed anyone?

Most consumers simply equate WiFi with general internet access, hence the often repeated claims on many supports forums of;

‘my wifi is broken (and then you have to go through the is it a WiFi or general connectivity issue - because they don't know the difference) or ‘I pay for xyz Gig Wifi and am only getting a fraction of that in my shed at the bottom of the garden....’ and so on.

I’ve said for years that WiFi is a bit of a black art; if you understand what it can and can’t do, it’s limitations, just how susceptible it is to outside interference, then fine - alas the majority of people don’t! And this is not helped by various ISPs promising all sorts in headline announcements, with the disclaimers in tiny print at the bottom. Yes they will sell you a 1 Gb/s connection but only guaranteed over a wired connection; you might get something close to that if any only if you live in the middle of nowhere, have the very latest devices, and are basically sitting right on top of the router.

Many of the ISPs here in the UK offer a ‘WiFi guarantee’, sounds good, but reads the small print. It states that you will get 20 or 30 Mb/s in every room in your house. if not, after jumping through a number of hoops they will (reluctantly) hand out a couple of ‘boosters’; well WiFi extenders. And if they don’t fix it, they will give you a one-off £100 credit on your account and then wash their hands of the entire problem and, basically tell you to FOAD. I mean, not literally, they still expect you to pay the monthly fee for the entirely of your minimum term.

My favourite response to the usual claim that ‘my WiFi is bad now but absolutely nothing has changed’ is ‘yes maybe nothing has changed in your house, what about your neighbours?’ ‘WiFi has no respect for property boundaries, I promise you I could move in next door to you and install equipment that would utterly obliterate your WiFi connection - not necessarily legal, but in principle......’

Exactly, if you can use a cable, then do so, otherwise, understand and accept the limitations.

[kmorwath]

Re: WAN speed anyone?

One ot the best thing of 5-6GHz bands is exactly their shorter range due to being blocked more easily by obstacles - so they can't "leak" much aorund. In turn, to get better coverage, you need multiple access points and their uplinks are better served by cables than a third radio (which is sitll subject to E/M laws...).

Business networks usually have multiple higher-level cabled APs - and still they have to shre the available total bandwdth. But reading what the Intel guys says the new specs are not about serving users' nneds - it's about serving AI company needs.

[spireite]

Re: WAN speed anyone?

I'm in a modern 5yr old apartment .

I can barely get WiFi to leak from the utility cupboard to my other rooms.

It would seem that the board for the walls appears to be foilbacked.

The whole building is a Faraday cage.

[tyrfing]

Re: WAN speed anyone?

Wireless is the default for home networks because most people either don't live somewhere they can run cable (rentals, condos, etc.), or don't want to.

You also have to re-run that cable eventually. What good is cat 5 when your new computers all have 2.5Gb networking?

For that matter, work has the same problem. Even if it's better designed for running those wires, it still costs money to do it, and yes cables do go bad.

I have a wired desktop that's close enough to the cable to run wired. But my TV is wireless as it's in a different room and I live in a high-rise condo so running inside the walls won't fly.

I live in Canada so this isn't a problem, but if you're in Britain and live in a heritage building good luck getting permission to run cable if it's even possible.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: WAN speed anyone?

"just that I don't feel the need to spend an extra 10 bucks a month when the 1gbps works fine"

1gbps is absolutely fine right now, 10gbps would be epic though, I'd get it immediately if I could...it's people with less that have problems...on gigabit you can shift 50GB in around 5-6 minutes...which is a decent size for a VM...if you're collaborating with a spread out remote team, 5-6 minutes is fine, you can have a short chat on Teams while you wait that long...it's people on 150mbps or lower that piss me off...shit gets derailed when you have to wait an hour for someone to "get all the files and be brought up to speed".

The save 10 bucks crowd usually don't have a gigabit internet connection, they usually opt for 150mbps or something shit for no reason other than to save a buck...which has massively implications professionally...there are people in my freelance circle that don't get considered for certain types of team up that might require rapid turnaround when moving large files about...especially if multiple VMs are involved...these save a buck kind of people are also usually the same folks that don't have their own servers as well...which makes it even worse because they try and do things in the cloud which burns even more time up.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: WAN speed anyone?

I'm in the suburbs in the southeast US. A long-established neighborhood, a few miles from a major city (in top 40 most populous US cities). This is NOT the boonies. We have 500Mbps fiber for $75 per month - and that only became available this year. Before that it was "5G" (mostly 4G) based internet access at, when working well, 75 Mbps down, for $50/month. The only other options are DSL (10 Mbps for $50/month), and Spectrum Cable ("up to" 200 Mbps, and I know many people who have problems with them.)

For many, it's not a "save a buck" issue, it's a "no decent options" issue.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: WAN speed anyone?

"Unless he is thinking everyone has that in the local LAN?"

Some of us do. Probably quite common around these parts.

Whether I would ever want to access any of it wirelessly is another matter entirely.

My household network is mostly fibre with the odd CAT6A run thrown in for those devices that cannot use fibre.

I personally prefer my internal transfers to be limited by the speed of the storage, not the network...my file server has 40gbps of network throughput available...can I saturate it? No....does that matter? Also no...but when I upgrade my storage (say I go from HDD to nvme), I know for sure that I'm getting an upgrade because I can actually see the difference in a significant way. I recently added a small 4 drive nvme volume to my network which achieves 14gbps (before the prices rocketed)...had I not put it on a fast internal network, I'd have never seen most of that performance...the upgrade may not have been "worth it".

I mean think about it, you walk through doors in your house at your own speed all the time without thinking about it...if each of your doors had a rubber membrane that you had to battle through every time you wanted to walk through a door, it'd drive you nuts...why is a LAN any different? Surely you want to move around your own network with as little resistance as possible, no?

[BOFH in Training]

Re: WAN speed anyone?

I got a nice NAS and other resources within my LAN, so I benefit alot whenever I upgrade my LAN.

The average person does not have LAN resources (skill set to maintain, expense, etc). Actually in my circle, there is only 1 other person with even a NAS, and he got it after seeing mine (although he got something with lesser capability, but suits him fine).

From what I have seen, most people have nothing on their LAN which is not a desktop, laptop or a mobile device. A few depend on cloud storage(with bottleneck at the WAN connection, most dont use wired LAN at all - WIFI not being an issue since the WAN is alot slower then whatever wifi connection they are getting), even fewer have a removal drive as a backup device.

I think the average person will probably benefit from a faster WAN connection, considering they are more likely to use cloud stuff, and wifi is usually not the issue for them. 5Ghz connections probably help since they dont leak out enough to interfere much with others.

[Anonymous Coward]

AVAILABLE??!!

Quote: "...Cordeiro says that Intel sees Wi-Fi 8 as the "connective technology for the AI era," one where in the not-too-distant future, everyone will have massive amounts of compute and storage available to them over the network..."

Yup....."available to them over the network...." .....i.e. end users.

......and of course also available to various spooks "over the network"!!!

Remember Jamal Khashoggi!!

[retiredFool]

Re: AVAILABLE??!!

Agree, to me the key phrase in the whole article is the idea of cloud compute/storage. What's old is new again. Terminals connected to a mainframe. Didn't like it then, don't think I'll like it now. Waymo's little disaster in SF on a powerfail demonstrated how reliance on externals can bite you.

[toejam++]

Re: AVAILABLE??!!

Or that Australian developer who had his Apple account closed after trying to use a supposedly dodgy gift card, which in turn locked him out of his iCloud content. He eventually had the issue resolved after Apple’s Executive Relations stepped in, but what about us peons who lack such clout?

[LBJsPNS]

Re: AVAILABLE??!!

Bend over and kiss your virtual ass goodbye.

[Neil Barnes]

the Teams session automatically transfers back to the PC

Which has meanwhile been stolen, you foolishly having left it unattended...

[Richard 12]

Re: the Teams session automatically transfers back to the PC

Pretty sure you can count the number of people who want that on the fingers of one finger. It's simply not a problem living and breathing people have. In the real world, the way Teams tries to transfer to mobile is a source of horror, not convenience.

Nobody wants a Teams call following them to the toilet...

Fortunately, WiFi 8 does not do any of that. It's primarily about better signal handoff between APs.

Quite why the Intel spokescritter mentioned it is unclear, because it makes them look like an idiot.

[blu3b3rry]

Re: the Teams session automatically transfers back to the PC

Agreed - it's generally a really annoying feature that hardly anyone wants.

I don't get the touting of a computer that locks itself when you move away, either. That's been a feature on W10 for years with just about any phone that's capable of pairing via bluetooth.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: the Teams session automatically transfers back to the PC

The ability to detect when to do device transfers would only be supported with wifi 8 as it can do position sensing. Wifi 7 can't.

Now who looks like an idiot? ;)

[eldakka]

Re: the Teams session automatically transfers back to the PC

> Which has meanwhile been stolen, you foolishly having left it unattended...

Nah, the computers still there, shame about the RAM though ...

[Blackjack]

I think my Router uses whatever WiFi was new ten years ago.

[Anonymous Coward]

I picked up 3 Ruckus R710s in the summer and they support 802.11 ac wave 2. They are from 2015 and received last fw update in august. I would get myself newer R750, if prices weren't so high. R710s were 30$ a piece and R650s go for around 300$. One feature I would gain is dpsk on wpa3.

[Blackjack]

If you buy used, make sure it is a Wifi Router that's supported by the OpenWrt project.

[Anonymous Coward]

“The proof of the pudding, of course, will be in the eating”.

Yes, and I see a lot of pie in the sky. Time to switch to disappointment mode, I think.

Anyway, does anyone want Wi-Fi that can interpret gestures? I’d hate my Wi-Fi to know when I was having a …. Well, you get the idea.

[Excused Boots]

Nurse, mind bleach, stat!

[munnoch]

Sounds like the sort of fanciful promises that were made for 5G. I believe we are still waiting for that version of the future to arrive.

Sure, you might be able to build applications over the top of it, for example based on its ability to sense the density of surrounding objects (which incidentally Wiz smart bulbs already do in a very simplistic manner to imply occupancy), but if anyone does they'll be crap and won't be supported beyond the initial poc.

At the moment 11ac does everything I need. I might get 11ax soon as the prices of used AP's reach pocket money level. One thing I've noticed though is that some 11ax AP's, particularly the ones with 2.5G uplinks, require POE+ i.e. they use more power than previous generations. Didn't see anything in the article promising smaller, less visually intrusive, more power efficient devices...

[Charlie Clark]

Indeed, sounds like Intel is dusting off the stuff it proposed for 4G (5G is just an upgrade) that Sprint tried for a while… What was it called? WiMax?

Mobile and WiFi have been converging since LTE was introduced and mobile started moving everything to TCP/IP. WiFi will always be limited by the tragedy of the commons of the available spectrum and the lack of the need to play nicely. My phone already uses WiFi in buildings if the signal is better than from outside and combined devices have been available for a while: much cheaper than putting up masts everywhere if you can get people to put cells in their houses.

[Kurgan]

AI of course

Oh, I really missed a Wifi with AI. How can I live with a wifi that's not AI enabled?

[IGotOut]

Jesus fucking christ

"Cordeiro says that Intel sees Wi-Fi 8 as the "connective technology for the AI era,"

Just stop.

Even better, stop, put down the computer, walk out the nearest exit and just keep going until you reach the sea or desert, then when you get there just keep going. Humanity really doesn't need people like you to exist in society.

[Excused Boots]

Re: Jesus fucking christ

Well I think....

Hang on, sorry what is that smell? It’’s like.... I’m not sure.

Oh no, got it, it’s the stench of desperation isn't it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Kids

Beware of men in lab coats peddling AI…

[kmorwath]

So even WiFi will spy on you?

A WiFi able to track people and idenitfy gestures (and with enough fingerprinting, people as well....) is a dream for both surveillance capitalism and authoritarian states (which in the end will become the same).

What bandwidth you need to send a text prompt to a remote AI and get a result? It would work on 56k modems as well. Or the problem is to have the bandwitdh to hoard even more data from the "endpoints" to better eat them?

It look now any improvement is bent to a single aim - and not one that will improve people life. A tinfoil hat no longer looks so crazy....

[Eric 9001]

All these "features"

But symmetrical transmission via different frequencies for uplink and downlink is still not going to be implemented?

[tyrfing]

This makes sense.

Higher data rate generally implies higher frequency for transmitting. You can also do tricks like using phase modulation, but I think that's pretty played out by now.

Higher frequencies are running into the problem that most materials we use are not transparent to them, so you end up needing lots of transmitters. Which removes a lot of the advantages of wireless.

Better error correction algorithms would mean less need to re-transmit, which means better use of the frequency you have.

[martinusher]

Wireless is an exercise in illusion

There's really no magic involved but Marketing tends to believe in it so we get these wild promises of unlimited bandwidth, ultra-high reliability and generally Sunshine and Roses For All. The reality is that you're juggling three variables -- time, bandwidth and coding density. Like the common "Fast, Good, Cheap" we're all used to you can choose any two from three. With wireless once all the corners of the band have been taken over then you get your (reliable) bandwidth by shutting out other users. You cheat with time by encroaching on guard bands (switching to a form of point coordination), you cheat with bandwidth by taking over more of the legal band (again, shutting out other users in the process) and you claim lighting fast speeds by increasing coding density of the actual payload part of a packet to the point where data becomes easy to corrupt unless you shout the loudest and then some.

The solution to wireless networking bandwidth has always been political. WiFi and other unlicensed users have been crammed into narrow slices of spectrum that have traditionally been regarded as useless (usually due these frequencies being absorbed by water). The spectrum is really all ours so the solution to inadequate spectrum is primarily political. For now we all have to learn to share and that means not relying on smoke and mirrors to pretend that something that doesn't exist actually does. WiFi has already made incredibly good use of this useless resources but pretending we can just go on extending it indefinitely by the magic of technology is fooling ourselves -- all that happens is a version of the 'tragedy of the commons' where a public resource becomes despoiled and effectively useless.

[Charlie Clark]

Re: Wireless is an exercise in illusion

I know it's early but have one of these.

[druck]

Don't just walk away

One such scenario Cordeiro suggests is one where a user is in an online meeting on their laptop, and gets up and walks away holding their phone.

"Automatically, the laptop and the phone will realize that they are moving away from each other, and this Teams session could transfer to my phone. I don't have to do anything automatically. I move away, the Teams session goes to my phone, and then when I come back to my PC, the Teams session automatically transfers back to the PC," he explained.

You are suffering from an upset stomach, quickly excuse yourself from the Teams meeting and make a dash to the toilet. On returning relief turns to horror as you find everyone in the meeting heard your bottom explosion when Teams transparently transferred to your phone and broadcast the entire experience (thankfully with the exception of the smell).

[Mostly Irrelevant]

You know. I don't even remember what Wi-Fi standard I'm using at home, seems to work fine so I don't care.