Experts Tout More Reliable Connections and Lower Latency as Main Features of Wi-Fi 8

Wi-Fi 7 offered significant advantages over earlier generations, said Sian Morgan, research director at Dell'Oro Group, who noted that the launch of Wi-Fi 8 will offer a different dynamic. While Wi-Fi 7 access points doubled the capacity and throughput of previous versions, users won’t see similar gains with Wi-Fi 8, she said.

There’s concern in the industry that without those increases, businesses won’t adopt Wi-Fi 8 or will do so more slowly, Morgan said. The “good news” is that the rate of adoption is generally similar between generations of technologies, and enterprises have “good business reasons” to move to the latest version. A major question, however, is how quickly suppliers will have new gear available, she added.

Wi-Fi 8 is “an important steppingstone” to the connectivity of the future, said Janne Linkola, principal product manager at Keysight’s Spirent. Wi-Fi has seen massive growth, and the average U.S. home already has about 20 devices that tie into the network, he noted. Congestion and interference are “starting to be an issue,” so the next generation will address those concerns, rather than providing faster Wi-Fi.

Wi-Fi 8 is about reliability, agreed Andy Davidson, Qualcomm's senior director of technology and planning. It will mean improved performance and consistent connections and latency as users move further away from the access point or between access points and “in the presence of congestion,” he said. For AI, consistent latency “is absolutely key,” he added. “We all see [AI] increasingly taking a role in our lives.”

Davidson also said Qualcomm sees smart glasses as one of the most exciting use cases of the future. Users will most often interact with computing devices via AI, and for that to work, connections have to be reliable and consistent, he said. As with 5G, people are talking about new use cases, but they will first experience Wi-Fi 8 the same way they experience Wi-Fi today, he noted.

Marcus Brunner, vice chair of the European Telecommunications Standards Institute fixed 5G working group, said the biggest feature of Wi-Fi 8 is “the extreme low latency,” which is already being demonstrated through industry research.

Morgan noted that after the COVID-19 pandemic, industry saw nine quarters when the supply of Wi-Fi equipment didn’t meet demand. After supply caught up, companies stopped buying products or slowed purchases for a while as they deployed gear that was back-ordered and suddenly available, she said. “We’re really just recovering from that now.” Wi-Fi 7, which launched in 2023, initially saw slow growth, but the uptake rate is accelerating, she added.

Tiago Rodrigues, CEO of the Wireless Broadband Alliance, said the use of the 6 GHz band for unlicensed connections remains a top issue for the Wi-Fi sector. The FCC is looking at changes that would allow higher power levels in the band and create a new category for geofenced variable power devices (see 2601080066).

Rodrigues hailed the U.K. Office of Communications’ decision to dedicate the upper parts of the 6 GHz band to shared Wi-Fi and licensed use (see 2601090060). He pointed to surveys showing that people support use of the 6 GHz band for Wi-Fi.

The biggest trends that will drive Wi-Fi growth are AI, smart-home and industrial IoT, and Wi-Fi calling, Rodrigues added. AI is already having a major effect on Wi-Fi networking, improving performance and reliability and allowing users to better digest all the data they’re collecting and improve their networks as required, he said. But, Morgan warned, some companies are struggling to see a satisfactory return when they invest in AI.

Rodrigues also said Wi-Fi 8 will add new capabilities for the technology. For example, greater use of millimeter-wave spectrum for unlicensed is promising and will help in dense environments like stadiums, he said.