Given Wifi 8 doesn’t intend to bring any speed upgrades of note I suspect those wanting speed will skip it. Wifi 5 users will move to wifi 7 once the prices come down. The skip a generation that happened with wifi 6 will happen again with wifi 8.
802.11 AC “wave 2” was a pretty important step up, using mu-mimo. Then nothing of interest happened with Wi-Fi 6. 6e just added 6ghz, which is good but you hit the problem of cost versus compatibility. There simply are not many 6ghz capable devices yet, so the argument is kind of a wash.
Wi-Fi 7 just dropped, again, with minimal changes.
Wi-Fi 8 I’m sure will be similar.
And all of the extra speed you could get from your fancy pants Wi-Fi 6/7/8/whatever router is pretty much negated by the early 802.11ac (or earlier) devices hanging out on your network, pulling the basic rate down as far as the router will allow so that the majority of the available airtime is spent sending broadcasts and beacons.
I work with technology for a living and honestly, the last two really exciting things I saw in wifi were mu-mimo and 6ghz being opened up. Everything else is iterative changes, and most of the speed advertisements are bullshit. It assumes perfect signal with the widest possible supported channel width with all radio chains engaged. Considering that most devices (mobile devices and laptops particularly) are either 1x1 or 2x2 for radio chains, you’ll never ever see the bandwidth advertised.
Really quickly, you need all the right things in place to get the advertised speed, 160 (or 320) MHz wide channels, good luck finding one that doesn’t have a nontrivial amount of interference on it… A sender and receiver with 3x3 or 4x4, and a clear channel with a low noise floor and no other networks or devices interfering with the signal.
Not only that, but the advertised speed is an aggregate of all of the radios at once, so rinse and repeat for each supported band.
You could go to a lot of effort to achieve all of this by basically turning your house into a Faraday cage, but even that’s not perfect and the stuff inside the house is still going to cause interference… Or you could settle for lower single link performance and just… Get a handful of access points so that the load is spread out and no single node is handling too much traffic.
I guess it has value for renters who can’t run wires. We’re probably just in a category of people who will hardwire something if bandwidth/latency matters
Im still on my Orbi setup from 2016 and desperately would like to get off them, but the things I want cost an absurd amount of money… I thought Orbi was bad when I got them and now I want a cheaper company but everything is just so expensive I can’t. But yeah the one ive been looking at is wifi 7. To bad the only devices that may ever support it are our phones.
Given Wifi 8 doesn’t intend to bring any speed upgrades of note I suspect those wanting speed will skip it. Wifi 5 users will move to wifi 7 once the prices come down. The skip a generation that happened with wifi 6 will happen again with wifi 8.
Wifi 8 will be a big deal…in the marketing for comcast. I’ve been rocking an old AC access point for years and haven’t even considered replacing it.
802.11 AC “wave 2” was a pretty important step up, using mu-mimo. Then nothing of interest happened with Wi-Fi 6. 6e just added 6ghz, which is good but you hit the problem of cost versus compatibility. There simply are not many 6ghz capable devices yet, so the argument is kind of a wash.
Wi-Fi 7 just dropped, again, with minimal changes.
Wi-Fi 8 I’m sure will be similar.
And all of the extra speed you could get from your fancy pants Wi-Fi 6/7/8/whatever router is pretty much negated by the early 802.11ac (or earlier) devices hanging out on your network, pulling the basic rate down as far as the router will allow so that the majority of the available airtime is spent sending broadcasts and beacons.
I work with technology for a living and honestly, the last two really exciting things I saw in wifi were mu-mimo and 6ghz being opened up. Everything else is iterative changes, and most of the speed advertisements are bullshit. It assumes perfect signal with the widest possible supported channel width with all radio chains engaged. Considering that most devices (mobile devices and laptops particularly) are either 1x1 or 2x2 for radio chains, you’ll never ever see the bandwidth advertised.
Really quickly, you need all the right things in place to get the advertised speed, 160 (or 320) MHz wide channels, good luck finding one that doesn’t have a nontrivial amount of interference on it… A sender and receiver with 3x3 or 4x4, and a clear channel with a low noise floor and no other networks or devices interfering with the signal.
Not only that, but the advertised speed is an aggregate of all of the radios at once, so rinse and repeat for each supported band.
You could go to a lot of effort to achieve all of this by basically turning your house into a Faraday cage, but even that’s not perfect and the stuff inside the house is still going to cause interference… Or you could settle for lower single link performance and just… Get a handful of access points so that the load is spread out and no single node is handling too much traffic.
I’ve been working in tech too long.
I guess it has value for renters who can’t run wires. We’re probably just in a category of people who will hardwire something if bandwidth/latency matters
Im still on my Orbi setup from 2016 and desperately would like to get off them, but the things I want cost an absurd amount of money… I thought Orbi was bad when I got them and now I want a cheaper company but everything is just so expensive I can’t. But yeah the one ive been looking at is wifi 7. To bad the only devices that may ever support it are our phones.
wifi windows edition