Wi-Fi 8 is the first wireless upgrade in years that isn't chasing speed

https://www.xda-developers.com/wi-fi-8-first-wireless-upgrade-years-isnt-chasing-speed-home-networks-need-it/

43•taubek•59m ago

Comments

LoganDark•40m ago

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.

trvz•30m ago

You used the wrong units there. Should be Mbps and Gbps.

LoganDark•25m ago

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.

gib444•19m ago

The widely-accepted convention is to use bits when discussing line speeds (as the article does).

riobard•11m ago

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.

tveyben•8m ago

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…

Gigachad•15m ago

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.

Reason077•5m ago

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.

LogTrim•40m ago

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.

Reason077•38m ago

Oh no. I haven't even upgraded to WiFi 7 yet!

LoganDark•38m ago

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

avhception•16m ago

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".

BlackRabbit1•33m ago

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.

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.

LoganDark•16m ago

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...

swiftcoder•21m ago

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.

riobard•14m ago

> 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.

PhilipRoman•6m ago

"per band" is also hilarious, as if you could get that kind of data rate in 2.4GHz

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