Wi-Fi 8 is the first wireless upgrade in years that isn't chasing speed
xda-developers.com252 points by taubek 14 hours ago
252 points by taubek 14 hours ago
What they really need is cheap WiFi 8 on 2.4 channel only so IOT devices stop shipping WiFi 4 or worse and cause headaches on the network.
We need reliable, real-world ~20mbit/s for our warehouse scanners, not 382722 theoretical Gbit/s 5cm from the access point. And roaming that works instead of stupid clients clinging to somewhere or being thrown into a reconnect loop when the AP tries to get them to roam. I know this is theoretically possible today. But in the real world, I have inherited the setup, so AP locations are fixed for now, clients are some random old handhold motorola android devices and interference is high.
In comparison, DECT has been flawless in the same space. Set and forget, just works. I always wondered if we could have a kind of DECT proxy on the LAN, and have the ERP application talk to that proxy using DECT... I mean, it's a few EANs and stuff, DECT could handle this easily.
Here's another one for you: today I found out that my dual-sim android phone has a single radio that is shared between the two sims. So when you are on a call, the 4G/5G doesn't work on the other sim, likewise, sometimes the the voice sim is unavailable while the other sim engaged with 4G/5G things... which is just stupid. Can't they just add two radios/chips (like many wifi AP's....)? So the whole setup on a consumer phone is actually quite unreliable because of reusing a single radio. I thought it was my buggy code, but nope, just the radio being shared and the mobile operator seeing the sim as offline. Crazy.
I can't speak to your specific setup, but if the two SIMs use different carriers then they will often need to use different frequencies. A phone could in theory use twice as many radios, but the emitted power limits would be the same, so you'd have reduced range or throughout for each (plus additional size, weight and power for the second radio). Access points have different SWaP budgets than phones.
When I travel, I try to use an eSIM that uses a network my home provider partners with. This seems to improve the chance that voice and data over LTE or 5G NR work simultaneously.
An additional radio would raise the price of your phone for at least another 200 or 300 dollars. Try to enable VoLTE if available for your operator. That makes the phone use the LTE connection for voice and don't drop the Internet connection while you talk.
Dual SIM Dual Active phones are under £100 in the UK, I imagine under $100 in the US.
Dual SIM Dual Standby (two or more SIMs, one radio) is cheaper, less battery, less space, and usually good enough. It's literally a few dollars, not 200-300.
Seems like I forgot to specify "5G" (those radios tend to be expensive) as the original poster was asking for an additional 4G/5G radio.
DSDA in 5G is rare, and I can't reliably find a phone that can do it in EU or US (I can find higher end chipsets that can do it, but phone vendors don't seem to follow through with it). Usually it's 4G+5G or 4G+4G.
Voice is normally done using VoLTE now.
Yep, although (at least in my experience) it's not enabled by default. I also learnt about VoWiFi (also called "WiFi Calling") that allows you using WiFi for calling, including when you're abroad or you don't even have phone signal.
Support for VoWiFi is a bit weird. Some operators don't allow it outside of your region (for example, the EU), some others will allow it and even bill you as if it were a local call made from your country.
Also, although it's in theory made only for working through WiFi, seems like if you have a second SIM or eSIM with a data plan (for example, a travel SIM local for the country you're on vacations) and some combination of phone and/or operators, it can use the second SIM as the data provider for WiFi Calling.
For the major US carriers, since they shut down 3G, VoLTE is the only way calls work. Which meant that a non-VoLTE-but-4G-capable device can no longer make 911 calls.
I was using a Samsung S5 running LineageOS for a while with Google voice for calls, but the no 911 thing is one of the main reasons I finally moved to a different phone. The S5 supports VoLTE but only with stock firmware.
Auch, wasn't familiar with that, haven't been in the US for a while. At least around here (EU) is not enabled by default on phones you buy off the shelf. I'm not sure about phones bought from the carrier.
What part of EU doesn't have VoLTE enabled? It is definitely widely used here in Sweden, though they simply forbid phones unable to do emergency calls over WiFi (including existing phones, which forced me to buy a new one. That was very irritating).
To explain myself better: it's readily available on the carriers, but if you just buy an off the shelf phone and put a SIM on it, it won't be enabled automatically (at least in a couple countries I tested it), and you'll need to go to your Android SIM/carrier settings menu and enable it yourself.
> Can't they just add two radios/chips
no. Too expensive.
Ironically, the cheapest phones available all tend to have Dual SIM Dual Active, usually because (in Europe at least) many have a second SIM card specifically for international calls.
So yes, it's "too expensive" because it's higher than $0, but it's not "too expensive" as in it would cost a lot.
Perhaps you can try DECT NR+ the new reincarnation of DECT and also backward compatible with the original DECT [1]. It can also do roaming.
It's under 5G standard but for non-cellular connectivity that means you can use it without base-station like Wi-Fi direct. It's geared toward IoT but its data rates are from 1 Mbps up to 1.3 Gbps depending on the operating frequency and the type of modulation being used [2].
[1] DECT NR+: A technical dive into non-cellular 5G (30 comnents):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39905644
[2] Technology: DECT NR+ [pdf]:
https://www.vdma.eu/documents/d/group-34568/technology_dect-...
I was recently made aware of WiFi HaLow. Official standard, ranges into the hundreds of meters. Speed suffers at long ranges of course, but still respectable (50-100kbs).
Difficult within the EU due to ISM limits.
Maybe ok for your garden camera where the authorities just don't care. But no go for any industrial usage.
The ETSI document actually does allow higher duty cycle if the radios take anti-interference measures. Some countries unfortunately have "harmonized" but skipped that part. Theoretically only a dumb transceiver (that can utilize only a single channel) has to limit duty cycle that low in those bands.
We have devices sending telemetry and occasional OTA updates without urgency (if it takes a few hours to get it over it’s not a problem).
If you need consistent MB range traffic for cameras I wouldn’t advise it but for low (5kbs) traffic it can be attractive. A few thousand bits can encode quite a bit of information. Don’t be fooled by the “kbs”.
You can do quite a lot with a few MB. Don't tell every React behemoth on the web that we know this trick.
Phew, I looked it up, just by curiosity. What a nightmare :') the rules, regulations, laws are damn strict Oo
Usually this rules are for experts who have to implement the limits. They should not be exposed to end-users.
Sounds like it fills the same niche as LoRa. Never heard of it though, thanks.
Dead outside the US unfortunately, worse range than regular wifi due to being strangled by lower channel width and ridicolously low power limits. The two bulky HaLowLink routers are the only off the shelf thing with support for it, it's nonexistent as a wifi standard.
I was so excited when I discovered it a few months back after struggling for years to set up reliable wifi for outdoor robotics, only to realize we can't have nice things. The struggle continues.
LoRa is not fast enough?
Same channel width and power restrictions. The US' 915MHz band is much much better than the EU 869MHz band
Don’t know about the parent, but I found LoRa adequate for (tiny) payloads (sensor data and such) but OTA updates are a PITA without some alternative channel. Speeds are measured in bytes / sec.
I've had similar issues with clients (Blink camera sync modules) connecting to far-away APs instead of the much closer router. I could not force them to connect directly to the router no matter what.
Turns out the 2.4 GHz radio of my router had died (Fritzbox 7590, apparently a common issue), thus forcing 2.4 GHz-only clients to use those other APs.
In ubiquity gear you can “lock” devices to a specific endpoint. I suspect ultimately you would prefer to have failover available but at least for troubleshooting you can see how it connects to that specific AP. Similarly you could see the amount of clients connected to an AP on every frequency and WiFi version.
You can ban devices from all access points except one. That is not "locking" it to one, it's just preventing it from successfully connecting.
It will still try to roam, it will still cause issues.
A lot of the roaming logic is in the clients. Newer android and iOS versions have gotten better but there are tons of old and new devices with poor roaming logic and capabilities.
And actually debugging this unless you have a bunch of enterprise level kit, or know exactly what the failure you’re looking for is is absolutely impossible
I used Wireless Diagnostics.app on macOS ("Scan" window) and looked for the 2.4 GHz radio's MAC address which was nowhere to be found. But yeah, you have to have a hunch.
Thanks - I’ll try this. I have a problem where my kindle only downloads books in one room (but I can make purchases in any), and I’m pretty sure that it’s connecting to a different AP and doing something stupid in the process
Yeah you can run stuff through DECT I'm not sure what handheld suitable gateway you'd use and strap to the holster of the associated scanner, but otherwise...
That said, in theory at the level you're asking for it'd be acceptable to run the system as a single frequency network by using the AP locations as remote radio heads and just not telling the handhelds that there are multiple APs in listening range.
I'd probably aim for using the wifi support mechanisms to dynamically fake nearby APs as "mimo antennas" from the POV of the handheld, but not doing so would also suffice, just transmitting from the one AP that's nearest to the specific handheld/client would already basically do the trick and could probably run with hacked firmware on commodity AP hardware basically turning the entire setup into a soft-MAC with that very software juggling the army of radios.
The setup btw. would not have the clients aware they're dealing with more than one radio on the other side.
You could be forced to ask/ping the client from multiple APs one after another if you've not heard from it in a while and it moved, but otherwise, you just rely on hearing it from multiple APs and tracking it so you don't have to make APs across the facility speak up and risk interrupting other clients that try to get a word in.
Oh, and ban by building ordinance usage of any other Wi-Fi on the channel your doing this on, or that's gonna eventually get you problems with congestion.
I hadn’t realised that DECT is still in use. It was pretty good in its heyday so glad it’s survived.
I have a DECT headset and I would never go back to Bluetooth. The range, reliability and the quality of modern DECT is great. Just make sure you get one with ultra wide band or similar otherwise you end up with cordless phone quality.
Cordless phones have mostly disappeared but the Panasonic Link2Cell models - where the base station acts as a Bluetooth headset for up to two mobile phones - are still around and are absolutely marvelous for older adults. They can plug their mobile phone in to charge and walk around with one of the handsets (a base station can support up to six!) so that if they should fall, they have a phone on them to call for help.
There are still landlines in use (although they mostly use VOIP instead of analog phone lines). All cheap cordless phones I know run DECT. It's more than enough speed for speech and more stable than wifi.
The AVM Fritz product line of consumer modem/routers all include a DECT modem for registering extra handsets for voice but they have their own proprietary handsets that support TCP/IP over DECT for things like audio streaming or sending extra media like a caller photo.
I've never really liked talking on cellphones and got a grandstream cordless DECT phone that runs over a voip line probably a decade ago. One of my favourite purchases.
How much data do the scanners really send backwards and forwards?
I feel like a lot of the problems people try to solve with wifi and dozens of access points could be better solved by a 450MHz-ish transceiver up on the roof with a downfire turnstile, and 9600bps radio modems in everything.
I'm going to embroider some red hats, going to put on them "MAKE SLOTTED ALOHA GREAT AGAIN".
Ensure your network has no <WiFi6 devices.
Easier said than done when you’re dealing with warehouse equipment.
Sure, but then this becomes a bit of an irrelevant comment on a discussion of how WiFi 8 will focus on increasing reliability.
Your old devices won’t magically get more reliable because WiFi 8 comes out. You will benefit from this after it comes out by migrating to WiFi 8.
Meanwhile, you can benefit from existing reliability enhancements by upgrading to WiFi 6.
If your response to that is ‘I can’t use WiFi 6’ then presumably the putative benefits of WiFi 8 are even more remote.
Care to expand?
Legacy clients force APs to accomodate them. Be it by using slower speeds with worse airtime consumption or by just disabling features that (can) make old clients misbehave.
> or being thrown into a reconnect loop when the AP tries to get them to roam
The AP does not have visibility into what the client actually sees, and no, a coordinator that has knowledge what the APs see isn't that much better.
Imagine a situation with two APs and a client being in the middle of the two in a RF-impeded situation (i.e. your typical office building). AP1 may "hear" the client better (i.e. it gets a higher RSSI and SNR), but the client may reject it in favor of AP2 because the client sees a better signal coming from AP2 due to reflections, a powerful RF signal from a floor above interfering with the channel of AP1 or God knows what else.
RF is a weird world.
Often times the problem is that the client radios are much weaker than the APs radios.
Sometimes we forget that for the communication to be reliable, signal must flow both ways. Clients will happily connect to far away APs, but won't be reliably heard back.
Solution is to use more APs and lower their radio tx power. A lot of customers push back on the approach because they have only one gaming router monstrosity in their country home and it works perfectly, not understanding that their downtown office with 150 devices have nothing in common.
I'm no RF expert, and we're not a big company. I wear many hats, from DBA to local WiFi expert. And while there are certainly limits to what can be achieved without dedicated experts, I want to stress how DECT in the very same scenario just delivers unwavering reliable operation without me ever giving a hoot about RF interference or 802.11k or r or any other implementation detail.
> And while there are certainly limits to what can be achieved without dedicated experts, I want to stress how DECT in the very same scenario just delivers unwavering reliable operation without me ever giving a hoot about RF interference or 802.11k or r or any other implementation detail.
DECT is a much, MUCH more old, simple and robust protocol. Modern signal processing tech can get you insanely far there.
How much money do you have? Nokia's Centralized RAN basically solves for cellphones by not choosing between AP1 and AP2. The device yells out a packet, both radios hear it, and the signals are combined in baseband processing. Wifi 8 doesn't quite do this, maybe 9's gonna have it. Or the patents run out and the telecom networks cooperate and everything gets a cell modem.
LoRa is quite nice for this in the lower frequency bands, and the bandwidth should suffice for this sorta thing. And the tech is super cheap to build and maintain, both hardware and software is open source.
LoRa is dialup speeds at best. Fine if the clients are basically wireless terminals but useless if you need to send photos or look at webpages.
Maybe read grandparent's comment again? They were talking about using DECT as an alternative and about string encoded EAN codes, not about watching YouTube in 4k.
Warehouses, factories, etc need private 5G, not Wi-Fi.
Industrial 5G is super expensive. Also almost impossible to find a vendor that offers all the nice protocol features (Low Latency, native Ethernet tunneling, etc.) in their infrastructure.
Most don't want you to setup your own APN ;-)
That's a standard IoT usecase almost all telcos offer.
We have industrial SIMs with our own APN and get a IPSec tunnel to the Telco where we have a dedicated network to see our devices.
We have about 20 client devices, I would very much prefer to throw a bunch of APs into the warehouse and it just works - DECT can do it, so wifi should, too. I'd settle for 10mbit/s!
I know what you are trying to say.
But they do use commercial wi-fi devices, albeit with a focus on configuring security correctly.
DECT or DECT-NR+?
I do kind of want to play with this.
Any DECT (NR) stuff is super expensive if you build embedded software/hardware for it. It's basically Nordic-only.
I read trough the planned improvements a while ago, and came to the conclusion that most would be mostly useful in ultra crowded environments such as stadiums, etc, so not very useful for a consumer. Would you agree?
Roaming improvements are nice, though in practice most firmwares already implement something similar AFAIK? OpenWrt & Ubiquity Unifi devices do, though there is no cross vendor protocol. Curious to see how Wi-Fi 8 handles that. Via the wired backbone?
From my understanding, the ideal solution for roaming would be that all APs identify as the same BSSID, and decide between them who answers a client, while sharing state. Scaling such a system may be hard in crowded environments.
Anyway, I updated to a Wi-Fi 7 router, and it runs warm enough.
Ultra crowded environments would include any apartment building in the city.
Dumb question: why not drop/deprecate the WiFi standards and adopt 5G/6G across the board (operating on different spectrum depending on configuration)?
Naively, I would assume that would save money on the BOM and make devices more flexible.
Again, naively, why not build and sell consumer-grade 5G access points/routers?
This new WiFi standard is far enough out (2028) that it seems reasonable to fold it into the 6G standard (early 2030s per the article)?
It would be nice if all laptops were suddenly equally capable to WiFi and cellular connections.
My semi educated guess is because different kinds of people sit on the two different standards boards, so you get siloed specs with the cross sharing of some good ideas. You could ask a similar question about HDMI vs thunderbolt.
How would I connect to my own network? Wifi and cellular solve different problems.
That's purely a software problem that stems from typical usecase. There's no technical reason preventing phone users from selecting the network to connect to. It's just that currently a SIM serves that purpose.
5g-NRU allows what you are speaking of, but imo still needs quite developments for actually being deployed in bands with interferance (i.e. WiFi).
I recently upgraded from a WiFi 5 router to a WiFi 7 one, and my bandwidth increase was a grand 0% (that's ok though I was actually just sick of my old router's shitty UI!)
There is about 10m and a brick wall between my AP and my desk so yeah, a fancy new MCS that can theoretically deliver 25Gbps was just never gonna be useful to me.
Also I've worked on (other non-WiFi) 802.11 products where our competitive edge was all about interference motivation. Our competitors at trade shows would see the demos and say "that's fake, you guys are cheating". So I have the feeling that in general there might be alpha in more resilient wireless links.
What kind of WiFi 7? (There are a lot that don't have 6GHz support).
You should get far better performance on 6GHz, though there are harsh power limits in most countries with various ways to enable it which may complicate things. But if you can get full power on 6GHz it should reach 10m no issues at all, and with 320MHz should be at least twice as fast.
If you can also get MLO working (which is not simple) you'd be able to bond another band with it.
I saw a really good improvement through a floor for a device that has wifi 7 radio. Went from about 300mbps to 2000mbps. Going from 5Ghz 80Mhz channel to 6Ghz and 320Mhz was a big change. What has not worked with wifi 7 is MLO, openWRT doesn't really support it very well yet and neither did the original firmware but I have no one on 6ghz within range so its been stable and performant.
For a while I had wireless mesh networking in my new house, until I finally got around to pulling fiber to get a proper 10Gbps backbone. Upgrading from my UniFi WiFi6E AP to a WiFi 7 doubled my effective throughput as measured by SpeedTest. This in a 1930s house with solid brick construction.
Try OpenWRT if you want a good OS for routers. No need to change hardware.
I've just upgraded to an 8Gbit package (50 quid a month, rude not to). I'm having to use the provided router as my old one only has a 2.5Gbit port (still provides wifi however). I'd be keen to know of any fairly decent openwrt compatible routers with 10Gbit/wifi 7 at a reasonable price.
For what it's worth there are now mini PCs on AliExpress with SFP+ ports. I have one running OpenWrt along with some inexpensive SFP+ modules that's been working great. Although with my setup, I opted to have an external wifi AP connected to it instead of relying on an internal wifi card.
Yea, good shout. I can keep my existing wifi in place anyway for the time being, I've only got 6e stuff.
Yeah I was considering this actually, but then I realised that I really want a working LAN 100.0% of the time, so I'd only go tinker mode if I had a backup. So I was gonna be buying a router regardless.
Now I have a Ubiquiti one, it's antithetical to my DIY instincts but I think I'm OK with my router being one of the proprietary appliances in my life.
Plus now the wired section of my LAN is really fast.
Honestly, you got me on this one. I probably break my OpenWRT setup every three months or so on average.
I recently decided to stop running anything too fancy on it and keep the router itself simple: just secure, robust networking. All the tinkering has moved to chained network VMs in QubesOS instead.
It was definitely nice having different LAN ports behave differently, multiple VPNs, policy-based routing, filtering, monitoring, and all that. But yeah, every extra thing I add is another chance to break the whole network.
All that said, I could never imagine going back from OpenWRT. The answer to basically any networking idea is always “yes.” There are pretty much no limits. I especially like that it doesn’t try to hide networking terminology or abstract everything away. You really get to understand what you’re actually doing and can choose the exact configuration you need, down to the smallest detail. Everything is exposed.
For your brick wall home situation; polarization duplex combined with some amount of beam forming/spatial-multiplexing plus importantly directional antennas on both sides of the wall would give you substantial gains even without increasing EIRP. Without EIRP increases it's the receiving side that needs the antenna to improve speed.
> interference motivation
I am not sure what that term means, but perhaps you meant "mitigation"?
Powerline networking is worth trying for this too.
As is MoCA, which in my experience is a lot higher-speed and more reliably so.
People tend to want speed, speed, speed, but tons of use cases are totally fine with a reliable 100 Mbps. For a lot of remote monitoring stuff, even 1 kbps is enough if it works reliably. Not everything needs to serve up a webpage.
Yeah I have tried it! It beats WiFi to some rooms, but to my office it's very slow.
You would never be able to predict this, which is an unfortunate thing about powerline IMO. You just have to buy the modems and see how they perform on your particular wiring.
Do you have personal success using powerline ethernet? I tried it once and it was utter shit.
A very expensive "up to 1000mbps" kit maxed out at ~200 when both devices were plugged into the same outlet. It just got worse with distance.
Just a bit of side opinion working rf and some electrical, and fully understand if that was the best you could get, but some outlets are wired on different circuits. Also, some rf devices get overloaded if you're too close and that can degrade performance. Not saying that's definitively what happened, but you could have been either too close or further than you thought
(Repeating myself coz I saw this after writing my sibling comment..)
It's highly variable in my experience. I've had it work pretty well in some situations and barely at all in others.
I have certainly never got 1000mbps. I think I have got 300 at best. In my office I can only get about 50 even though it works pretty well in other parts of the same small apartment.
... Which is kinda annoying coz they aren't really all that cheap for something you have to just buy and then find out later if it actually works!
I tried this once too and instead bought a big-ass SRS bit and went through a concrete wall instead.
Rock solid and reliable networking =)
How often do you see your router's UI to justify any change?
I had a TP-Link deco, which while great as mesh, you couldn't limit the speed of certain devices. Which was again fine, except when the PlayStation 5 in a room could literally saturate the whole 250mbs bandwidth of my internet and when it would do an update would make our whole houses internet unusable.
It's seriously impressive how it wasnt possible to set per device speed limits or even QoS which has been a thing since like 2007
Is your Deco in AP mode or router mode? Mine says QoS is only available in router mode. I just use my ISP router with the AP turned off and my Decos in AP mode. My ISP router is pretty full-featured so I don't really care to deal with whatever simplified management the Deco would give me if it was the router and firewall instead.
My router is slightly loadbearing for my homelab so probably much more often than average!
I have a multi AP setup for the same reasons as the parent - large thick internal walls (and a “long” home instead of evenly shaped), and frustratingly more than I want to is the answer…
> with Wi-Fi 7 reaching a maximum theoretical throughput of 23Gbit per band
Note to tech reports: do not EVER quote this metric as it is the most useless piece of information.
"per band" is also hilarious, as if you could get that kind of data rate in 2.4GHz
Stop chasing everything. Stop and give me true open source repos for the Wi-Fi chips and drivers so the already well-established community can care for my router for the next 20 years. Force this into the spec.
https://wireless.docs.kernel.org/en/latest/en/users/drivers....
Even Intel is doing a poor job with firmwares. Its been such a pain lately to deal with them (WIFI, LAN, CAMERA). Its no longer just plug and play.
Are you talking about router firmware or NIC drivers? There's a slim chance of vendors opening drivers, but firmware is never going to happen.
It's the first because we finally caught up on speed. We have it better than I imagined possible.
Last year, I saw 1600 Mbit/s from the Internet at a normie's place with an ISP-provided router. Still have a cat 6 cable around the living room but haven't used it in the last 2 years. Not exactly wifi but I routinely get 600-800 Mbit on 5g networks in crowded areas.
Ethernet isn't just about speed, it's about reliability. Before I wired my office, I regularly experienced latency spikes and hangs on video calls. After upgrading, I essentially never do.
If you're using a Mac, it could be from the brain-dead way Apple OSes implement WiFi based geolocation.
It's 2026 and I'm running more cat-6 in my home to all my static devices. My theory is using wires lowers wireless contention, leaving more WiFi for the mobile devices.
Not theory, this is literally just how it works. Only one device can transmit on a WiFi channel at any given moment. A whole lot of the WiFi standard is just dealing with scheduling multiple clients wanting to transmit on the same channel at the same time.
The more clients you have on the same channel, the less bandwidth they all get (effectively). Using wires where you can will improve wireless for everyone else, including your neighbors.
I put in 2 CAT6 wires to every room in the house (4 in my office, 4 in garage), with one big PoE switch in the garage.
Everything with an Ethernet port is wired, wifi is for phones and tablets only (a few UniFi WiFi 6 APS).
Works great!
Internet has never dropped for me while working, family loves the always working NAS streaming via wired Apple TV.
I did this five years ago, and it's been great. My wired access points are still Wi-Fi 6 and I've got no inclination to upgrade them yet, connectivity has been near-bulletproof.
Incidentally I ran cat6 to a few locations but its so thick and stiff I kinda regret it. The internet seems to think 5a is more than enough and 6 was a waste.
anybody tried fiber network / hubs at home ?
I have a 10gbit LAN running over fiber with Mikrotik switches and cheapo Intel NICs. Works fine, and it makes remote disks quite a bit nicer than when they are over 1gbit.
I put some fiber in the walls just in case but there are not really many cases for this to be worth just yet
I wired up my office, and thr speed test after was slower than on wifi. haven't had a chance to debug it yet, but it's something to consider.
If wired Ethernet shows less than 1Gbps, something is wrong. This stuff is super reliable.
USB Ethernet dongles generally suck. Even “name brand” dongles are cheap crap from contract manufacturers.
A few years ago, for some reason my ISP began to screw up my WiFi. Tech support could not help; I had at least two devices showing the same symptoms; at one point I even shut down my home connection out of frustration. I could only think of two possibilities: that there had been some kind of security event that tripped their security AI and was blocking my WiFi (and inexplicably leaving all Ethernet connections unhindered.) Second possibility: they were deliberately (but deniably) messing with my WiFi access at home so that I would use more mobile data. In fact a salesman told me that would be a logical move. Except it was affecting my Chromebook too.
So my only choice was to purchase a third-party router/WiFi. I did not want to make the network more complex, but if my ISP router couldn't provide WiFi, it would need to happen.
So now I have a working WiFi 7 router, and my ISP's device is permanently in Bridge Mode. I went to the hardware store and purchased a bunch of little cable staples, and I nailed up an Ethernet cable from the router to the bedroom. There are 3 desk positions in here that can be reached by Ethernet cable.
Unfortunately, if I am out on the balcony, I normally need to use WiFi, because I can't fully shut the door when a cable is snaking out of it. Also, I picked up a little USB-C-Ethernet dongle for my phone, if worse comes to worst. The bandwidth is great; besides, my downstream is only 100Mbps, so who needs overpowered LAN bandwidth?
In typical WiFi fashion, for all the WIFi 8 features to working perfectly and debugged we have to wait for WiFi 9 [1]. This was true with WiFi 5, WiFi 6 and WiFI 7.
Unfortunately IMO WiFi router brand selection is getting increasingly small. I have no issue or problem with using UniFI myself. But it is not something I could recommend to family and friends as they don't know how to set it up. Eero is not available to much of the world outside US. I just wish Apple revive its AirPort Express business.
[1] https://www.nokia.com/blog/advancing-connectivity-with-wi-fi...
Wait till you see the number of actual chip vendors.
There is about 3.. Broadcom, Qualcomm and MediaTek. Together they control I believe 100% of wifi chips used in routers and APs. Often it's sold as a package / system on chip so it's also the main cpu.
On the client side there is a little bit more competition but not much.
Client side don't you just add Realtek and Intel? I don't think almost anyone else does wifi chips.
Yup. I might have forgotten Marvell in the list but yes, that is pretty much it.
I am also not sure of their exact market shares but I would suspect one or two are probably steering the majority of the "standards". I'd suspect Broadcom and Qualcomm to have the most influence.
I believe Intel is also a pretty prominent member in the standards committee. Mostly for historic reasons as I don't think they have too much market share outside of PC/laptop wifi modules.
But I agree, Broadcom and Qualcomm are the heavy hitters.
> "Wi-Fi 8 is expected to be finalized in 2028"
So we should see mainstream consumer device adaption by 2030 (not much point in having a wi-fi access point that implements pre-finalized Wi-Fi 8 if none of the client devices do) and prices become reasonable maybe by 2032? The tech is cool but it's hard to care about something that far in the future.
Wifi is a weird one, consumer devices arrive very quickly (often times before the standard is finalized). You can expect devices as early as next year.
Makes sense. Last router upgrade I reached the point where my wifi speeds (at least near the router) were indistinguishable from plugging into gigabit ethernet - that's fast enough for any home task, and the same speed as my fibre uplink. I can't see chasing speed further, outside of very specialised setups.
Oh no. I haven't even upgraded to WiFi 7 yet!
You are not missing too much.
One of the core features (MLO) is currently mostly scam. APs/Clients negotiate the protocol (and it shows up in the status) but doesn't it to either increase robustness or bandwidth (by combining/switching between two frequency bands).
Also the driver quality is a huge mess.
(We tested it using the latest generation Cisco Enterprise gear but also with Prosumer stuff like Ubiquiti or TP-Link)
But honestly: we need WiFi-8. It finally brings infrastructure-controlled roaming which is super important for any VoIP service.
The only reason to get a wifi 7 router is that it supports wifi 6 better than a wifi 6 router
It sounds like you're talking about throughput aggregation, which indeed no device currently supports. Not even Apple's most recent devices have any sign of it, except that M5 Pro/Max MacBook Pro models are tested for simultaneous transmission on 2.4+5GHz and 2.4+6GHz: https://mrncciew.com/2026/03/17/macbook-pro-m5-wi-fi-7-missi...
> which indeed no device currently supports
Aren't devices with Intel Wi-Fi 7 BE200/BE202 are supporting that?
As well as latest Samsung phones?
AFAIR: the BE200/B202 only have one radio. So no parallel streams on two frequencies.
But they are the best cards around if you want to play with Wifi-7 on Linux. But always go for the latest wireless-next kernel + firmware blobs. Also they are not compatible with AMD mainboards (go for Qualcomm then).
Being connected to multiple frequencies simultaneously is one thing. Actually using multiple of the links in parallel to increase speeds has not really been seen in practice yet. That is called STR (Simultaneous Transmit/Receive; what I called "throughput aggregation" above), which requires MLMR (Multi-Link Multi-Radio), which almost nothing that supports MLO has right now. Maybe some bleeding-edge mesh networks are doing it, and Ubiquiti has one or two products that does it, but you basically won't see it anywhere else and especially not in client devices yet. Intel BE200/BE202 does not actually perform throughput aggregation, it connects to multiple frequencies and then uses only the best of them (eMLSR, or "Enhanced Multi-Link Single Radio").
> infrastructure-controlled roaming
802.11 r/k/v exists
That's not controlled, seamless hand-over as we know it from GSM/3G/LTE/5G for 30 years now.
We basically miss all data (received stations/signal levels from both sides, Bit Rate errors, etc.) for making roaming decisions and then to softly connect them to an AP you want them to be on.
Enterprise WiFi is currently mostly "This is a list of APs you maybe can connect to.. have fun.. if you can connect we pre-seeded the AP with some crypto data, so it doesn't take ages to negotiate. Here's your (more or less friendly) disassoc. Fuck off bye."
It does somehow work for stationary setups - but as soon as you have mobile traffic (like walking around or machines moving) with multiple APs the quality hits the shitter brutally.
Currently this gap is being filled by industrial 5G with dedicated frequencies. It's crazy expensive.
On paper, yes. In the real world, that random Android client is clinging to an AP that can barely hear it while a better one would be available.
The upgrade to 6E was a big jump in my network (Wifi7 Unifi Wall AP). On the same spot, the M3 MacBook (6E) has basically zero lag over VNC, while the M1 MacBook (6) has a noticeable lag. It’s a bit mind blowing how big the difference is.
That is likely because of AWDL and your WiFi card doing channel hopping to listen between packets.
Set your channels to 6/149/37 and the lag will probably vanish. Exactly because of this, I only run those channels, even across multiple APs.
In Europe, you may need to use 44 instead of 149.
There is currently no good way to keep AWDL off other than a script that just turns it off every 200ms, because of course Apple. Also, not always an option with work issued Macs.
Not missing much. I feel like it's in many ways misguided. 6ghz ftw because 5ghz penetrates too much and causes noisy neighbor problems. Well, from my experience, 6ghz doesn't penetrate at -all-. So unless you live in a barndo or studio apartment, it's mostly an exercise in frustration.
I have a Wi-Fi 7 AP and this confused some members of my family that didn't even know it went higher than 6. I thought it was pretty funny
My family doesn't know that the WiFi AP is not the DECT base. They understand when I tell them, but that's gone after a week. They use the words WiFi (or, as we say in Germany, WLAN) and "Internet" almost interchangeably. At work, too. "Internet kaputt" can mean anything from "my device is broken" to "our ERP app is not doing the right thing / responding too slow".
That is true everywhere. I think operating systems could do a better job at informing about the health of the internet connection in words the user understands. What seems to be the current bottleneck:
Your router does not respond. Turn it off and on.
This comes close: https://www.getapp.com/all-software/a/breakdown/
You can’t blame them, though. I live in the industry for over 25 years now, and when 5 Ghz wifi got introduced, and started to live alongside 2.4 Ghz with all the different protocols, I was like: "Nah. Screw it." I honestly have no idea what the current hot stuff in terms of wifi is.^^
Yeah, I guess I draw the line at the workplace. Some of these "Internet kaputt" cases turned out to be a rejected login to our bespoke ERP website.
I recently had to change from wpa_supplicant to iwd to get around the 200 access point search limit.
It would be nice to have fewer than 200 access points in range..
Less latency is excellent news. This is the main reason why gamers still prefer Ethernet.
Consistent latency is generally more important for gaming than low latency. If I had to pick between a baseline of 8ms but with enough spikes to > 200ms to bring the average to 30ms, or a consistent 90ms with no spikes or dips, I would certainly choose the latter.
>The stated goals of Wi-Fi 8 include a 25% increase in throughput at different signal-to-interference-and-noise ratio (SINR) levels, reduce latency by 25% for the 95th percentile scenarios with latency
So it is getting faster (in both senses) and doing so in scenarios that actually matter.
Time for new steamlink.
> (…) while further increments have been smaller in percentage, speeds have always increased very significantly.
Off topic, but that sounds sort of contradictory, or misleading at the very least.
Well, if the first increment is 100%, you only need 50% the next time to get the same absolute increase as the first time. And then 33%, and so on.
That's how I read it at least.
I'd just like something that can manage 250m and a few large oak trees in between.
Pre-terminated direct burial fiber, a trencher, and two media converters.
Makes sense since a lot of networks don't have access to speed. The highest speeds in my area are around 150MBps, so 5-6GBps or whatever is a perfectly fine upper bound for me. Range and congestion however has been an issue.
It's nice to have the fastest Wi-Fi possible even if your upstream internet is slower. Sometimes you want to transfer files locally between devices, or run backups etc. Faster Wi-Fi here can make a huge difference to those tasks.
I have found that higher tier WiFi aids local game streaming significantly, but most of that benefit seems to be the 6Ghz band that you get with WiFi 6E.
Yeah. I ran ethernet from my router specifically to improve games streaming (GeForce NOW). It was a huge improvement over standard 5 Ghz WiFi.
You can still make use of more. Local video streaming from your PC to tv, file transfers between nearby devices etc.
Modern wifi is fast enough that using cables is often not required.
You used the wrong units there. Should be Mbps and Gbps.
I did not use the wrong units, I converted them. The speeds available in my area currently max out at 1.2Gbps which is 150MBps.
When talking about network bandwidth, it is custom to measure in bit-per-second therefore the "bps" notation. If you convert to bytes, it is highly recommended to use "b/s" notation instead, i.e 150MB/s, to avoid confusion.
But IIRC the de facto unit for network transmission speeds are bits - not bytes - pr second, and when it’s more the rule than the exception than people write ‘B’ in stead of ‘b’ then the confusion gets even higher..
I would expect this crowd here to not make these mistakes as ofte. :-)
B is defacto for storage…
The widely-accepted convention is to use bits when discussing line speeds (as the article does).
"Hands up who's every gotten close to the theoretical max speed of wifi 7. Ok, sure, well hands up who's even got half that... er."
Are we not yet at a point where we could have a truly global network that uses multiple technologies and mediums to keep a user always connected?
Like seamlessly switching between Wi-Fi, nG, Bluetooth, satellite, pigeons, cans-and-wire.. and still having a stable global address? (that you could change later of course)
It's possible using overlay networks but other than that there has been no progress on that front. The routing table updates would overwhelm the system. Ipv6 does nothing to address device roaming. There is multipath TCP but I have never encountered anything using it.
Most improvements on that front has been happening on the application layer, where the app attempts to retain functionality even though the underlying network conditions are changing, to various degrees of success (mostly not that great).
There's a great hyper-sci-fi RPG setting called Numenera, set a billion years in the future, that has this cool little concept of a "datasphere", as in analogous to atmosphere, an omnipresent permanent connectivity network..
Shouldn't that be our end goal with all this tech?
>> But with Wi-Fi 7 reaching a maximum theoretical throughput of 23Gbit per band
No. Just no. That speed is only possible when standing at a Nevada test range, in late spring, on a ladder, holding the router above your head, with a black cat sitting on your left shoulder. Any minor change from those parameters and your speeds will be 30% the theoretical maximum ... maybe 50% if you can only find a grey cat.
With real devices I get something like 1.8GBit/s with less than 2 meters between the stuff. Which is far from maximum but who cares, it is still great.
Sacrificing bandwidth for range and reliability would be a welcome change, but I’ve far passed the point where all news about Wifi just strikes me as marketing bullshit.
The peak-speed arms race stopped being interesting to me a while ago. I don't need 20+ Gbit/s theoretical Wi-Fi. I need the connection to stay boring when I'm at the edge of coverage or the neighbours are hammering the same spectrum.
The 95th-percentile latency and packet-loss targets here seem much more meaningful than another 2x headline speed increase.
My only scepticism is how much of this survives real consumer hardware. Wi-Fi 6 had things like OFDMA that sounded great on paper, but support/implementation was pretty uneven.
Agree completely. Higher speeds are a bit pointless for most users. Unless you have an extremely fast NAS, where you need to copy (not stream) data over Wi-Fi, you're unlikely to be anywhere near the current limits.
I'm using 802.11ac and see no need for higher speeds.
> Higher speeds are a bit pointless for most users.
Higher speeds automatically means less latency and that does matter, especially if you are into stuff like games where every millisecond matters.
old wifi already have sub 1ms latency, it doesn't matter to be any faster than that
I think the point is that these numbers are theoretical, and only reachable in a lab. So in practice you do not really benefit.
My neighbor thinks that they can increase their 100Mbps ISP speed by having 5 or 6 access points at 2.4GHz in their 1400sq ft (~140m2) apartment.
There’s so much interference that the package dropout rate is around 40% at 2.4GHz usually.
Having a AP in every room can be as significant boost if the walls impede the signal a lot. In fact we have one wall which is especially bad. Stand in front of it or next to it and reception from the front of the house is decent. Take one step back behind the wall and signal drops to less than 10%.
So having the 5-6 AP is not the problem, then shouting at max power is the problem. Especially “gaming” routers tend to do this.
2.4ghz is pretty bad but the 5 and 6ghz bands don’t really travel far. I’m in a dense area and 5ghz works great while 6 has basically no detectable traffic.