At present, more and more devices have begun to support the Wi-Fi 7 standard, but the adoption speed of this standard is relatively slow. Most users are using the Wi-Fi 5/6/6E protocol. In the home environment, the Wi-Fi 6 protocol can already meet most usage needs.
Even so, the Wi-Fi Alliance is already working hard to develop the Wi-Fi 8 standard. The alliance plans to launch the Wi-Fi 8 standard in 2028. It is expected that devices supporting Wi-Fi 8 / IEEE 802.11bn (ultra-high reliability standard) may be certified and even marketed from the end of 2027. The Wi-Fi 8 standard is not focused on the maximum transmission speed. The Wi-Fi Alliance hopes to improve the effective throughput and connection reliability of Wi-Fi, so the highlights mentioned in the Wi-Fi 8 draft include Coordinated Space Reuse (Co-SR), which can coordinate the transmission power of multiple Mesh APs to avoid mutual interference between APs.
With coordinated space reuse, Wi-Fi 8 should also help improve download speeds for every device in the home by reducing interference, so that the quality of the network connection will not quickly degrade when there are more wireless devices, affecting the user's ultimate experience.
The Coordinated Beamforming (Co-BF) feature of Wi-Fi 8 can also coordinate the transmission modes of multiple APs, which can also be used to provide the best performance for the device. From these features, it can also be seen that the Wi-Fi Alliance hopes that the new standard can greatly improve the user's Wi-Fi connection experience. After all, reliability is the most important thing.
In the absence of effective spectrum, the Wi-Fi Alliance can only continue to use the 2.4GHz, 5GHz and 6GHz (actually 5.9GHz) frequency bands. In this case, it is impossible to significantly improve network throughput and signal coverage.
Therefore, the collaborative work of multiple APs will be the focus of Wi-Fi networks in the future. It is still very difficult to rely on the transmission power of a single router to cover a larger range. Now the Wi-Fi Alliance can only improve stability and other aspects to provide users with a better experience as much as possible.