The next generation of Wi-Fi, Wi-Fi 8, is currently being developed behind closed doors. This time the emphasis is not on pure speed, but instead on improving the user experience.
Wi-Fi 8, now known as IEEE 802.11bn Ultra High Reliability, is still years away. Wireless technology is constantly improving: each advance in the evolution of Wi-Fi takes several years to discuss, approve, and then deploy. Wi-Fi 7, the “current” standard, has not even been formally ratified yet.
But that won’t stop Wi-Fi 8 from developing behind the scenes, and we already know some of the details. MediaTek’s Filogic wireless division has released some of what to expect, with the caveat that final details won’t be announced until the final specification is released around September 2028.
The key phrase to think about in the context of Wi-Fi 8? No peak throughput, but effective transit.
Wi-Fi 8 will look a lot like Wi-Fi 7
According to the Wi-Fi Alliance and MediaTek, the United States is not the driving force behind wireless evolution. Instead, it’s China: the country has 650 million broadband subscribers and more than a quarter have 1Gbps broadband connections at home. Overall, the average connection speed is 487.6 Mbps, up 18 percent in a year.
MediaTek
Theoretically, 802.11bn/Wi-Fi 8 has been outlined (Word documentvia the IEEE) to provide enough wireless bandwidth for your broadband gateway delivering a few gigabits per second, and taking into account Ethernet’s ability to provide even more. AllRF interpreted that 2022 document, known as Project Authorization Request (PAR), as one that would provide a minimum aggregate throughput of 100 Gbps.
Since then, the PAR was approved in 2023 and the working group has started working out more details. As of November 2024, MediaTek believes that Wi-Fi 8 will look nearly identical to Wi-Fi 7 in several key areas: The maximum physical layer speed (PHY) will be the same: 2,880 Mbps x 8, or 23 Gbits/s. It will also use the same four frequency bands (2, 4, 5 and 6GHz) and the same 4096 QAM modulation over a maximum channel bandwidth of 320MHz.
(A Wi-Fi 8 router obviously won’t achieve 23 Gbps bandwidth. According to MediaTek, actual peak throughput in a “clean” or lab environment is only about 80 percent of hypothetical peak throughput, and actual real-world results may be much less .)
MediaTek
Still, simply put, Wi-Fi 8 should deliver the same wireless bandwidth as Wi-Fi 7, using the same channels and the same modulation. Each Wi-Fi standard is also backwards compatible with its predecessors. What Wi-Fi 8 will do, however, is change the way your client device, such as a PC or a phone, communicates with multiple access points.
Think of this as an evolution of the way your laptop communicates with your home’s networking equipment. Over time, Wi-Fi has evolved from communication between a single laptop and a router, over a single channel. Channel hopping directed different customers to different bands. When Wi-Fi 6 was developed, a dedicated 6GHz channel was added, sometimes as a special “backhaul” between the access points in your home. Now mesh networks are becoming more common, giving your laptop a variety of access points, channels and frequencies to choose from.
How Wi-Fi 8 will improve Wi-Fi technology
MediaTek sees several opportunities to improve coordination between access points and devices. (To be fair, we identify these as MediaTek’s efforts, only because we can’t be sure they will ultimately be approved by the 802.11bn Working Group for Wi-Fi 8 as a whole.)
Coordinated spatial reuse (Co-SR): This technology was first implemented in Wi-Fi 6 as Spatial Reuse. The problem arose when there was a difference in transmission power between an access point “talking” to a nearby device and simultaneously communicating with a second access point far away. If the first access point were to reduce its ability to communicate with the nearby device, it would not be able to be “heard” by the access point.
Wi-Fi 8’s Co-SR is a “maturity” of the Spatial Reuse technology and will solve the problem by allowing the access points to talk to each other and coordinate their power output, MediaTek said. “Our preliminary testing shows that Co-SR could increase overall system throughput by 15 to 25 percent,” MediaTek says.
Congestion: the whole killer.
MediaTek
Coordinated Beam Forming (Co-BF): There’s a trend here: taking previous Wi-Fi technologies and extending them to multiple access points. Spatial zeroing was a feature launched in 802.11ac (Wi-Fi 5) that essentially allowed the router to stop signaling in certain directions. By doing this, the router would send the signals where they were requested, and avoid interfering with devices that didn’t want to talk to the router.
This technique tries to solve a fairly common problem in connected households or in a public space with Wi-Fi: two devices very close to each other. Coordinated beamforming allows the access points to talk to each other, figure out which device wants the signal and which doesn’t, and align the mesh access point to steer the signal away from the device that isn’t communicating with the network by essentially refusing to transmit to the region in which it is located.
“The throughput capacity provided by Coulated Beamforming (Co-BF) in the next generation MediaTek Filogic has been significantly improved, with increases ranging from 20 percent to 50 percent in a mesh network setup with one Control AP and one Agent AP,” MediaTek said .
Dynamic subchannel control: You’re probably aware that the latest devices support the latest wireless standards, such as Wi-Fi 7. But certain devices may also have more or improved Wi-Fi antennas, giving them higher throughput. Previously, that information was passed to the router and stored there.
That wouldn’t be a problem under most circumstances. But in a scenario where a number of different devices were downloading the same file, DSO would create a dynamic scenario where a more advanced device would receive a subchannel to download the file faster. The difference between the older approach and Wi-Fi 8’s DSO would be that the access point would be able to decide, ‘know’ each device’s capabilities and what it was asking for, and route the data accordingly.
MediaTek believes DSO could increase data throughput 80 percent higher than without the technology.
A common Wi-Fi scenario: As you move around your home, your wireless data speed adjusts accordingly.
MediaTek
New data rates: You may not be aware of what the MCS indexthe modulation coding scheme for WiFi. It’s basically a table that allows your Wi-Fi router to determine what the connection speed should be so that you can actually connect and stream data without errors. If your throughput speed drops as you move around your home, it’s partly because your device and router “decide” what connection speed your device should stream at.
The problem, according to MediaTek, is that the “step” to lower speeds is too big and that additional gradations need to be introduced, such as 16-QAM with a coding speed of 2/3. The idea wouldn’t be to introduce sharp drops and increases in throughput as you move your phone or laptop around the house, but smaller increments. Again, MediaTek believes these finer MCS divisions can improve overall transmission speeds between 5 and 30 percent.
A change of pace
Again, the evolution of Wi-Fi 8 depends on how quickly the standard moves through the regulatory process. Wi-Fi 7 (802.11be) was expected to be approved last September, but that has not happened yet. Sonys PlayStation 5 may not be approved for India as the country has yet to approve the 6GHz wireless channel on which the Wi-Fi 7 standard depends. That would also hinder Wi-Fi 8.
The likely roadmap for Wi-Fi standards adoption.
MediaTek
It takes about six years to develop wireless standards, and impatient hardware manufacturers rarely wait. As MediaTek notes, Wi-Fi 7 products have been available since late 2023, even though the standard has not yet been formally adopted. In part, that’s because the IEEE committee responsible for the standard rarely makes dramatic changes between the approval of the draft standard and the final standard. For Wi-Fi 8, the first products are expected to be available in early 2028, although final approval should occur at the end of that year.
However, it’s worth noting that the race to ever-higher speeds is at a standstill for now in two different segments of the PC market. CPUs have slowed their rush to higher clock speeds – at Qualcomm and at Intel – in favor of lower power. With Wi-Fi 8, the focus now seems to be on improving the overall user experience.
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