- Cisco’s Matt MacPherson traces Wi-Fi’s evolution to today’s Wi-Fi 7, where multi-link operation delivers smoother, more reliable performance
- Newer consumer devices support Wi-Fi 7, but many enterprises are still using Wi-Fi 5
- While enterprise users catch up to Wi-Fi 7, the industry is already talking about Wi-Fi 8 – and 9
Cisco Wireless CTO Matt MacPherson remembers one of his earliest interactions with Wi-Fi. Back in the 1990s, he used Wi-Fi to play the computer game Quake with his kids and their neighbors.
“We made a little neighborhood network so that we could play games together,” he said. “My kids thought I was the coolest dad ever, so that was good.”
Of course, since then, Wi-Fi has taken off like a rocket. Officially released in 1997, the IEEE 802.11-based standard is one of the most successful communications technologies ever launched. Today, the vast majority of mobile phone traffic inside buildings travels over Wi-Fi.
“We used to say it was 80% Wi-Fi and 20% cellular, and even then, we were being conservative. But the latest numbers I’ve seen from multiple sources are now claiming somewhere between 90 and 93%, so what we’re seeing is that Wi-Fi consumption is growing faster than cellular consumption,” he told Fierce.
There are multiple drivers for Wi-Fi's indoor prevalence. For technologies like IoT, it’s easier and cheaper to deploy a Wi-Fi network. “Cellular is not the greatest technology if you're trying to do something like put a light bulb on the network,” he said. “One of the advantages that Wi-Fi has is it's got a very low cost of entry, and so we can do a lot of innovation.”
Is 2026 the year of Wi-Fi 7?
A hot technology today is Wi-Fi 7, which marks an upgrade from Wi-Fi 6 and Wi-Fi 6E, introducing many features, with multi-link operation (MLO) probably being the most significant, according to MacPherson. Wi-Fi 7 improves reliability, latency and determinism, and complements other QoS mechanisms.
For consumers, “everything runs smoother,” he said. Consumers with newer mobile devices from Apple and Samsung are using Wi-Fi 7.
“What's happening now is it's become ubiquitous,” he said. “Now anybody that builds a laptop is putting Wi-Fi 7 in it, and that's very much aligned with our refresh cycles.”
But a significant number of Cisco enterprise customers – more than 40% – are still using Wi-Fi 5. “There’s this pent-up demand that’s been waiting to make the transition, and now they’re getting into that refresh cycle,” he said.
Where he sees demand for Wi-Fi 7 is in areas like education, manufacturing, warehousing and healthcare. For example, in education and healthcare, there might be 300 students in a lecture hall using AR glasses to watch a surgeon operate.
That can't be done on Wi-Fi 5, he said. “Do you know how many augmented reality or virtual reality headsets you can connect (on Wi-Fi 5) before you start to degrade the experience?” The answer: two. “What we're doing with Wi-Fi 7 now actually makes these types of use cases possible where they weren't before,” he said.
Next-generation Wi-Fi
So, what’s next? Wi-Fi 8 is emerging, with Broadcom last year unveiling an ecosystem of Wi-Fi 8 solutions for residential, enterprise and client devices. That’s far ahead of the final IEEE approval for the specification, which is targeted for March 2028.
Given this pace, Wi-Fi 9 is practically right around the corner. “There’s been some early proposals,” he confirmed. “But it’s very early. We’re kind of in the ideation phase on what’s going into 9, but the thought process is going to kick up pretty seriously over ’26.”
In other words, Wi-Fi is moving faster than you can say “Quake.”