As the Wi-Fi 7 Rollout Accelerates, Wi-Fi 8 Starts Its Formation Lap

Following the recent completion of the Wi-Fi 8 (802.11bn) Draft 1.0 specification, there have been a number of significant announcements showing that the technology is, even at this early stage, set to propel itself into the spotlight. In October, Broadcom announced its initial suite of Wi-Fi 8 solutions targeting residential Customer Premises Equipment (CPE), enterprise Access Points (APs), and client devices such as smartphones and PCs. Based on version 1.5 of the Draft specification, the portfolio consists of the residential-focused BCM6718, a tri-band 4X4 solution supporting 320 Megahertz (MHz) channel bandwidths, the enterprise-focused BCM43840 4X4 Wi-Fi 8 radio, and BCM43820, a 2X2 scanning and analytics Wi-Fi 8 radio. All three access solutions come equipped with Broadcom’s BroadStream wireless telemetry engine for Artificial Intelligence (AI) training/inference and dedicated eco modes for up to 30% greater energy efficiency, as well as other features including packet scheduling and advanced location tracking capabilities, depending on the specific chipset. On the client side, its BCM43109 is a 2X2 Wi-Fi 8, Bluetooth®, and 802.15.4 combo chip that also supports 320 MHz channels in the 5 and 6 Gigahertz (GHz) bands. The suite of Wi-Fi 8 solutions is currently sampling to select partners, and the Intellectual Property (IP) is also available for licensing.

Meanwhile, at Network X, Sercomm, in partnership with Broadcom’s residential BCM6718 solution, unveiled its Wi-Fi 8 platform targeting AI-driven home environments. The solution will offer deterministic latency, multi-gigabit throughput, intelligent spectrum management, and integrated AI/Machine Learning (ML) capabilities with the goal of unifying Wi-Fi 8 connectivity with better smart home orchestration and edge intelligence, as ABI Research had forecast would be a key theme of future connectivity trends earlier this year. Alongside this, TP-Link recently delivered the world’s first demonstration of Wi-Fi 8, validating the benefits of the technology, while others such as Synaptics announced their licensing agreement for Wi-Fi 8 with Broadcom earlier this year. Finally, MediaTek and Qualcomm have already been actively discussing their vision Wi-Fi 8 throughout the course of the year.

While the focus of Wi-Fi 7 (802.11be – Extremely High Throughput (EHT)) was to maximize the peak performance and throughput capabilities of Wi-Fi, particularly in the 6 GHz band, the objective of Wi-Fi 8 (802.11bn – Ultra High Reliability (UHR)) is to offer much more reliable performance for the technology in real-world conditions by solving multiple different challenges. These include more seamless roaming capabilities, more reliable performance at the edge of the network, enhanced congestion management, better coexistence with other technologies, and optimizing the power efficiency of both the network and client devices. To achieve this, a number of techniques are being introduced within Wi-Fi 8, with some of the main (but not all) innovations discussed below.

• Multi-AP Coordination: With the growth of mesh networks and environments with multiple AP deployments, coverage has been significantly increased. However, these networks have the potential to overlap and provide content for the same spectrum resources. To address this issue, Wi-Fi 8 introduces inter-AP coordination, enabling networking equipment to better schedule transmissions and reduce the potential for congestion while working more collaboratively. For example, Non-Primary Channel Access (NPCA) allows the utilization of secondary channels when the primary is congested, while techniques such as Dynamic Subband Operation (DSO) and Dynamic Bandwidth Expansion (DBE) can enhance the capacity and reduce the potential for slowdowns.
• Enhanced Modulation and Coding Schemes: Wi-Fi 8 also brings new and more granular modulation and coding schemes designed to optimize throughput even when the device is moving farther away from the router. This helps smooth out any sudden performance issues and ensure greater stability throughout the deployment environment. Furthermore, with Unequal Modulation (UEQM), each stream is now able to run at the best possible rate it can manage, meaning that a device with a weak stream will no longer impact the performance of another.
• Enhanced Range: Further enhancements such as Distributed Resource Units (dRUs) spread the transmit energy across a wider band to improve performance for low-power devices or devices at the edge of the network, and improve uplink performance. Meanwhile, Enhanced Long Range (ELR) introduces a 20 MHz mode that can extend coverage significantly for devices at the edge of the network.
• Enhanced Coexistence: Wi-Fi 8 also brings a number of features seeking to improve coexistence with other technologies such as Bluetooth® and Ultra-Wideband (UWB) that often share resources such as antennas and spectrum with Wi-Fi. In-Device Coexistence (IDC) enables a much smoother and more consistent experience when multiple radios are in use at the same time.
• Enhanced Roaming: Wi-Fi 8 also supports more seamless roaming across multiple APs, allowing client devices to maintain a continuous link when moving between different APs, reducing slowdown, broken links, and offering a similar experience to cellular networks.

While, for many, the arrival of Wi-Fi 8 has come early, it represents a broader shift over the last decade when the Wi-Fi generations have become increasingly contracted. Broadcom’s first Wi-Fi 7 chip was only announced in 2022, and just 3.5 years later, we already have the first sight into its Wi-Fi 8 offering. In comparison, Broadcom’s first Wi-Fi 6 chip was announced in 2017, a 5-year gap between generations (albeit with Wi-Fi 6E unveiled in 2020). While this pace of innovation is impressive, it also poses challenges on how service providers and device manufacturers position and market their solutions, as well as how to transition their offering to the latest technology, alongside achieving Return on Investment (ROI) on their investments when the product lifecycle is shorter. In addition, Wi-Fi 7 has already placed reliability as a core value proposition; therefore, proving the extra benefits of these new Wi-Fi 8 features will be critical. Furthermore, it may be more challenging to convey the added value of Wi-Fi 8 to the consumer compared to Wi-Fi 7, due to the shift in emphasis to higher reliability versus max throughput. For consumers, higher speeds is clearly very easy to understand, while reliability may be something less tangible.

In addition, with Wi-Fi 7 now fully in the mainstream in both client and network infrastructure upgrades, it may also take some time for consumers and enterprises to take full advantage of the UHR benefits that Wi-Fi 8 can bring. Therefore, service providers may need to play a balancing act in terms of accelerating the Wi-Fi 7 rollout, while planting the seeds for their Wi-Fi 8 offering, without diminishing the impact of either. Also, it is a difficult challenge to market the UHR benefits of Wi-Fi 8 without too severely questioning the performance of Wi-Fi 7 and legacy Wi-Fi technologies, which are now being deployed en masse in enterprise and industrial settings, as well as consumer devices demanding low-latency, robust, and high-throughput performance, such as within Extended Reality (XR) applications.

On a positive note, with the shift in focus toward reliability, and without the need to support new wider channel bandwidths or new spectrum bands, the cost and complexity differential between Wi-Fi 7 and Wi-Fi 8 is unlikely to be as significant as that between Wi-Fi 6 and Wi-Fi 7, which had to absorb the addition of the 6 GHz band and 320 MHz channels. Meanwhile, Wi-Fi 8 is already being positioned as an AI enabler in much of the early messaging, thanks to its ability to offer real-time, low-latency, always-on, and robust connectivity for all types of devices. For example, Qualcomm has highlighted the need for reliable, low-latency connectivity to access edge or cloud based-AI for real-time inference, while Broadcom is reiterating the importance of uplink thanks to the rise of AI applications, smart assistants, and the need for low-latency, real-time Wi-Fi for real-time agentic applications.

Wi-Fi’s continued innovation is also directly addressing many of the challenges that 5G was so greatly hyped to address almost a decade ago. This includes mission-critical and mobility-centric use cases in enterprise connectivity such as within collaborative robotics and Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs), AI-driven smart home applications that require health, security, and energy monitoring for contextual awareness and autonomous management, and enhanced performance in public settings such as transport hubs, stadiums, conference centers, and other densely congested environments.

ABI Research expects Wi-Fi 8 to be a key discussion point in 2026, particularly in relation to its role as an AI and new service enabler across home, enterprise, industrial, and public environments. Prototype Wi-Fi 8 CPE/APs are likely to emerge, and there is the strong prospect for some Wi-Fi 8 CPE/AP product announcements to occur throughout 2026. Meanwhile, significant volumes of Wi-Fi 8 are expected to begin in 2028, and ABI Research expects that nearly 700 million Wi-Fi 8 chipsets will ship in 2030.