The recent Wi-Fi World Congress event in Dubai highlighted the breadth of continued innovation in Wi-Fi technology, its widespread adoption, and its growing range of applications and business models for consumers and enterprises. The latest version, called Wi-Fi 7, is gaining increasing traction, and the next iteration – Wi-Fi 8 – is already appearing on the horizon.
Many of the newest capabilities are enabled or enhanced by the availability of 6GHz spectrum, on top of the existing 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands. The new frequency range allows for more than just extra speed – it is also fundamental to many additional benefits for reliability and guaranteed performance.
This is important for both consumer connectivity and enterprise wireless scenarios.
Increasing numbers of ISPs are providing residential customers with the latest 6 GHz-capable Wi-Fi gateways, which coupled with gigabit-speed broadband allows for more reliable use of multi-room streaming, security cameras, gaming, video-editing or other demanding applications. Putting the new advanced devices onto 6 GHz keeps them away from the potential disruptions from older products or those with cheaper chipsets.
Meanwhile, business deployments of Wi-Fi 7 are critical for high-density environments such as warehouses full of robots, or visitor-led venues such as hotels and airports.
How 6 GHz improves performance and capabilities
The 6 GHz band is central to new Wi-Fi 7 and future Wi-Fi 8 experiences. This additional spectrum is exploited by advanced chipsets and devices which can use wider radio channels (up to 320 MHz), better coding or “modulation” techniques, and more resistance to local interference or difficult propagation environments.
In addition, having three separate frequency bands allows devices to switch between them, or bond them together in clever ways, using a technique called multi-link operation (MLO). This can be combined with more granular transmission timing and quality of service (QoS) techniques, allowing devices to describe traffic characteristics such as “burstiness” and delay tolerance. This means that the network can schedule packets more intelligently, rather than treating everything as “best effort with a few priorities”.
This means lower latency (delay) in transmissions, fewer dropped connections, and better handovers for users moving between access points - such as someone walking through an airport, or a robot moving around a factory. There is also scope for better performance in environments with high densities of users, such as a university lecture hall with hundreds of laptops and smartphones, or where there are many access points in close proximity, such as hotels or apartment buildings.
Mesh networks, used for whole-home Wi-Fi, can also benefit from having separate 6 GHz “backbone” links between nodes and “access” links to which users connect directly.
Another really interesting recent Wi-Fi innovation is in the use of the wireless signals for sensing. There is now a standardized way to use changes in radio conditions (such as reflections) to infer motion, presence, and even some shapes, gestures or human vital signs like heartbeats. While Wi-Fi sensing can work with the traditional 2.4 and 5 GHz frequencies, the wider 6 GHz channels enabled in Wi-Fi 7 improve the sensing resolution and reliability significantly.
Some residential ISPs or enterprise Wi-Fi networks already offer movement-triggered monitoring, for instance for security and alarm services, or measuring room occupancy for lighting and temperature controls. Other possible use cases include proximity alerts for workers near machinery, or even fall-detection, although these may need supplementary technologies for full reliability.
Looking forward to Wi-Fi 8
Early versions of Wi-Fi 8 chips are already starting to come onto the market, even though the final version of the standard might still be two years away. A headline feature is “ultra-high reliability”, making the technology especially suitable for demanding environments such as industrial automation, healthcare imaging or AR/VR in the home.
This will be based on capabilities such as better interference management, especially in enterprise settings where the APs can coordinate better amongst themselves, use beamforming or “spatial reuse” in smarter ways, and generally avoid stepping on each others’ toes from a radio point of view. It should “play nicely” with other wireless technologies like Bluetooth and UWB as well.
This means Wi-Fi 8 should have up to 25% more speed and lower latency, even under the most challenging wireless signal conditions – but it will require continued full access to the 6 GHz band to deliver its full potential. We can also expect Wi-Fi 8 to have better range and be even better at delivering uninterrupted performance during mobility and access point handoffs. There is also ongoing work on new Wi-Fi security aspects, such as “post-quantum cryptography” which should emerge in the same timeframe.
6GHz is critical for Wi-Fi innovation
While some of the upsides discussed here can be delivered by partial allocation of the band – such as the lower 6 GHz portion already available for unlicensed use in Europe, Japan and other markets – the full benefits can only be demonstrated when the whole range from 5.9-7.1 GHz is made available for unlicensed use, as the U.S., Canada, South Korea and a number of Latin American markets have done.
For example, 1200 MHz can allow for seven non-overlapping 160 MHz channels, which is important in dense settings or where there might be network nodes on floors above and below. Indeed, in the Wi-Fi 8 era, there is even an argument for allocating additional spectrum, such as in the lower 7 GHz band.
Further improvements can be made by extending the usability of 6 GHz to outdoor domains, or indoor with standard (higher) power levels and range, through the use of automatic frequency coordination (AFC) platforms. Devices query a cloud database to check they can use the extra power levels at a given time/place, given the need to protect other licensed incumbent users.
This has potential both in residential settings to allow 6 GHz to be used more fully across the home – and the garden – and also in enterprise settings for campus-wide applications such as outdoor coverage and vehicle connections.
At the moment, AFC adoption is still at fairly early stages, with only U.S. and Canada having it fully live and operational. Other markets such as the U.K., Saudi Arabia and South Africa are investigating it.
Challenges will persist
It should be noted that not all of this is easy or immediate. There are still many older devices, and many ISPs and enterprises will continue to use older Wi-Fi 4/5/6 variants for some time. Some of the cheaper Wi-Fi 7 routers only support legacy dual-band frequencies, often reflecting their export from China, where 6 GHz has not been made available.
In enterprise settings, despite the smarter features of Wi-Fi 7 and the greater spectrum resources available, it is still important to have good network design and installation practices to make optimal use of them. There is also a dependency on good-quality devices that have undergone proper testing and certification.
Conclusion
Wi-Fi already accounts for the bulk of most peoples’ network access – whether that’s scrolling social networks on a train, working on a laptop in a café, or watching streaming video on the sofa. While we all use mobile services as well, around 80% to 90% of a typical smartphone user’s traffic runs over Wi-Fi. That is likely to continue, especially as automated switching becomes easier, using techniques such as OpenRoaming federation.
Every business also relies on Wi-Fi, especially in office and retail environments – but also in factories and industrial settings. Again, there are other wired and wireless options that have their jobs as well, but Wi-Fi is the workhorse for wireless computing and a wide range of IoT devices. Newer versions of Wi-Fi are much more robust and reliable, making them suitable for business-critical machinery and automation systems.
Perhaps the biggest problem for Wi-Fi is its relatively low visibility with policymakers. While it remains absolutely central to most users’ and businesses’ experience of the Internet and cloud, it tends to get less attention than other technologies such as 5G/6G and satellite networks. Given the dominance of the U.S. in Wi-Fi systems, that seems a remarkable oversight.
One of spectrum policymakers’ goals for 2026 should be greater recognition for this essential tool, and support for the ongoing innovations and new capabilities it can offer.
Dean Bubbly is the Founder of Disruptive Analysis. He is one of the leading analysts covering 5G, 6G, Wi-Fi, telco business models & regulation, the future of voice/video, and the emergence of technologies such as quantum networking and AI.
Op-eds from industry experts, analysts or our editorial staff are opinion pieces that do not represent the opinions of Fierce Network.