Wi-Fi 8: Stability, Not Speed, Is The Name Of Its Game
ZDNet, Monday, January 6th, 2025
The last few major Wi-Fi releases have all been about getting the fastest possible connection. Wi-Fi 8 is about making sure that your connection is stable.
Officially, Wi-Fi 8 is known as IEEE 802.11bn or Ultra High Reliability (UHR) Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN). The key word in that mouthful of a name is reliability. Instead of chasing higher speeds, which is what Wi-Fi 7 was all about, Wi-Fi 8 is designed to deliver a more consistent and dependable connection.
You may have read that Wi-Fi 8 will be much faster, up to 100 Gigabits per second (Gbps). This speed boost would be accomplished using a technology already used in some 5G implementations called millimeter wave (mmWave). That's the theory, anyway. In practice, mmWave promises to be hard to implement. Many people expect, as do I, that if mmWave does appear, it will be in an even later protocol called Wi-Fi 8E. I don't expect to see mmWave in devices this decade.