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

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

xda-developers.com

349 pointstaubek291 comments

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.

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.

Sounds like your old, random clients might be a problem?

One of many, yes!

Ensure your network has no <WiFi6 devices.

Easier said than done when you’re dealing with warehouse equipment.

Care to expand?

Things you can say in 2062, not 2026.

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).

Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11ah

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.

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.

The problem is that the application of the rules is inherently usage-specific.

For example, with the 1% duty cycle limit it is totally fine to have a transmission take 30 seconds - provided you only send 1 transmission an hour. Want to send one transmission per minute? You'll have to get your transmission time down to 0.6 seconds. And your transmission speed is inherently linked to your data rate, and by extension your signal range.

There's no one-size-fits-all solution possible here. Either the user has to give it some information about their specific use case, or it'll have to stick to the absolute most pessimistic limits.

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.

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.

The EU's ISM limits are trash.

Really there should be a world wide 900-1000MHz ISM band.

Kinda explains why starlink router doesn’t integrate it. Would be perfect for cameras around small farms.

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?

Sounds like it fills the same niche as LoRa. Never heard of it though, thanks.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

I hadn’t realised that DECT is still in use. It was pretty good in its heyday so glad it’s survived.

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.

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.

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-...

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.

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.

You can get an additional phone with a screen, 5g radio, ram and everything for $150. An additional radio should not raise the price for another 300.

I assume for something like a phone these things are non-linear. going from 2 PCIe lanes (nand, radios) to 3 (another radio) may cause an SOC to jump from entry-level to mid-level, larger PCB and increased layer count, more antenna for simultaneous use, etc. so its not just the cost of the chip but all the secondary effects.

Common dual SIM configuration eTLA(extended three-letter abbreviations) are:

  - DSDA: Dual SIM Dual Active, theoretically can call and do everything on both SIMs simultaneously  
  - DSDV: Dual SIM Dual VoLTE, can standby on both at all time but can't "use" at the same time     
  - DSDS: Dual SIM Dual Standby, can standby on both on so long radios don't conflict(3G+4G|4G+5G)
  - DSSS: Dual SIM Single Standby, can physically mount two SIMs to just electronically switch between

Or you can only use 2 sim cards at a time even tho both can connect over wifi calling.

Two very different ideas at play, I agree. Only easy to argue in hindsight that it should of more tightly specified everything to aid better roaming.

Wi-Fi: general-purpose, massively interoperable LAN radio → let the client make decisions.

DECT: purpose-built cordless mobility system → tightly specify the radio, handset/base-station behaviour and handover mechanisms.

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.

How often do you see your router's UI to justify any change?

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…

My router is slightly loadbearing for my homelab so probably much more often than average!

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

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.

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 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.

Powerline networking is worth trying for this too.

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.

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 =)

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.

It's a Unifi Dream Router 7. The 6GHz doesn't reach through the wall IIRC

That doesn't support high power 6GHz (called standard power/AFC). You need one that does support that to get the (much) higher 6GHz transmit power.

> interference motivation

I am not sure what that term means, but perhaps you meant "mitigation"?

Correct, it was a typo that I only spotted after I lost the ability to edit.

> 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

It's slightly better than the aggregate number :p

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.

The real reason why 5G and Wifi are separate is because one is licensed spectrum, and the other is unlicensed spectrum.

I'm not talking about legal differences- laws can always be changed- but rather how bandwidth is allocated. The biggest benefits of cellular comes from:

  Verizon owns/controls channel
        ↓
  gNB decides:
  "You transmit here."
  "You transmit here."
  "You get 20 MHz."
  "You get these time slots."

Wifi needs to follow listen-before-talk rules:

  Everybody shares unlicensed spectrum.
  
  AP: "Is anyone transmitting?"
   ↓
  wait
   ↓
  transmit

So at the end of the day, even if you take all the fancy expensive 5G hardware and software algos and shove them into the wifi standard, you still won't get the benefits of 5G.

And furthermore, the unlicensed spectrum problem is complex. "Anyone transmitting" includes Bluetooth devices, and Zigbee, and many other protocols that will never even try to follow the 802.11 spec.

> many other protocols that will never even try to follow the 802.11 spec

Such as microwave ovens (although my microwave oven does indeed follow the 802.11 spec)

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....

Unfortunately ( for the WiFi Alliance ) that doesn't sell new kit.

There's only 1 (one) all-open chip I know of: ath9k ar9271 802.11n 2.4 GHz from 2011.

Atheros (now Qualcomm) released its firmware source: https://github.com/qca/open-ath9k-htc-firmware

I have many, many these dongles :)

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.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31356730

Or from keeping AirDrop enabled all the time.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

anybody tried fiber network / hubs at home ?

Having WiFi 8 (or even 7) on your access point is only really useful if you have a population of clients that can use the features it offers. I regularly sample the devices attached to residential wifi routers and the facts are grim: in a house of 40+ devices, two can do wifi 7, about 10% can do 6Ghz, 50 to 60% can do 5GHz but not 6GHz, and a core rump of 50% of the devices are stuck on 2.4GHz. I suspect this is because all those cheap smart home things like roku sticks and pet feeders and so on are built for cost and a decent 5Ghz chip is just too much to ask.

This is true if you only have one access point.

If you have a mesh system with more than one access point, your network benefits greatly by using WiFi 7 (or 8, now) as a dedicated wireless backhaul that connects the access points to each other.

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...

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.

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.

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

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…

Then we calculate the Bytes to see how fast we can download a file.

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.

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.

Oh yeah, to be clear, my host PC is always wired.

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.

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)

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.

> all APs identify as the same BSSID, and decide between them who answers a client

That is decidedly not a solution. Neighboring APs necessarily need to be on different channels, to avoid Co-Channel Interference (CCI). An AP doesn't answer just on BSSID but also on a specific channel.

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

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.

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.

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...

UniFi UDB-Switch has throughput aggregation for 5GHz + 6GHz.

5GHz? Surely you mean 5000000kHz ;P

> 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).

> infrastructure-controlled roaming

802.11 r/k/v exists

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.

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.

So SCTP (multi homing)?

The only reason to get a wifi 7 router is that it supports wifi 6 better than a wifi 6 router

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.

>> 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.

Less latency is excellent news. This is the main reason why gamers still prefer Ethernet.

> (…) 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.

Time for new steamlink.

I'd just like something that can manage 250m and a few large oak trees in between.

A drone carrying a fiber cable across the tree line. Battle tested.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I think the point is that these numbers are theoretical, and only reachable in a lab. So in practice you do not really benefit.

That's not really how latency works though.

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