A Look Ahead to the Key Connectivity Trends and Challenges of 2026

The year 2025 was one of key growth for the wireless connectivity industry, with many companies rebounding after a difficult 2024 and capturing new market opportunities across key product segments. Central to this has been the expansion of wireless connectivity into new markets, the growing demand for edge Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities, the continued technology innovation around size, power, range, and cost, the emergence of new wireless technologies, and the addition of new features to existing wireless technologies, such as ranging in Ultra-Wideband (UWB) or Channel Sounding in Bluetooth®, among many others. ABI Research expects 2026 to be another strong year for the wireless market, bolstered by continued technical innovation, alongside the emergence and maturity of potentially high-growth market sectors.

• Next-Generation UWB: ABI Research forecasts UWB technology to be one of the fastest growing wireless connectivity technologies between 2025 and 2030. However, existing link budget limitations have caused challenges in real-world deployment scenarios, particularly for automotive digital key applications. Known as next-generation UWB, IEEE 802.15.4ab is a new amendment to the UWB standard that introduces a number of major improvements designed to enhance the secure ranging performance and accuracy over greater distances, enable a more consistent user experience, optimize efficiency, enhance scalability, and enable new use cases that existing UWB technology may struggle to support effectively. These enhancements will be critical to the success of future UWB use cases in the coming years. ABI Research expects many more product announcements based on IEEE 802.15.4ab to come in 2026, following the Calterah Dubhe chipset solution in June 2025. In addition, ABI Research expects further development in UWB as an audio and low-latency connectivity technology, in addition to opening new sensing and radar applications.
• Sub-Gigahertz (GHz): Interest in the sub-GHz market is growing rapidly, with a combination of proprietary, Low-Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN), and other solutions such as Wi-Fi HaLow all seeing renewed interest and traction thanks to the desire to have enhanced range performance across multiple home, building, smart city, and industrial applications. In addition to the growing availability of Wi-Fi HaLow products and solutions in 2025, there has also been a resurgence of Z-Wave Long Range, while vendors such as Silicon Labs and STMicroelectronics have recently introduced new sub-GHz chipsets in their portfolios. Furthermore, in November 2025, the Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA) announced the release of Zigbee 4.0 and Suzi, the new branding for Zigbee’s operation in the sub-GHz band, further highlighting the interest in sub-GHz, alongside other technologies such as Amazon’s Sidewalk and Wi-SUN for market-specific applications such as metering. ABI Research expects that interest in the sub-GHz market will grow rapidly in 2026 with continued portfolio evolution and investment in the technology from new vendors.

• Bluetooth® Evolution Continues: Bluetooth® technology has continued to evolve in recent years, introducing key features such as Channel Sounding, LE Audio, and Auracast™ broadcast audio. These have all seen strong traction in 2025 and are expected to gain additional traction in 2026. In particular, the number of Auracast™ broadcast audio-capable solutions arriving on the market has accelerated significantly over the last year, while the first real-world public deployments of Auracast™ broadcast audio emerged. ABI Research expects 2026 to be a strong year for Auracast™ broadcast audio adoption in both consumer devices and public venues. Furthermore, other developments such as Bluetooth® High Data Throughput (HDT) will bring further enhancements to Bluetooth® technology, with data rates up to 8 Megabits per Second (Mbps) opening up new opportunities for enhanced audio among other applications.
• Wi-Fi 8 Enters the Stage: As highlighted in a previous ABI Insight, 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. Most notably, Broadcom announced its initial suite of Wi-Fi 8 chipsets targeting residential Customer Premises Equipment (CPE), enterprise Access Points (APs), and client devices such as smartphones and Personal Computers (PCs), in addition to other Wi-Fi networking platform announcements. ABI Research expects many more chipset and product announcements in 2026 as key vendors create their vision of Wi-Fi 8 and ultra-high reliability Wi-Fi across different environments.
• The Shift to Wi-Fi 7 for the Internet of Things (IoT): While Wi-Fi 6 has become the dominant technology for Wi-Fi IoT applications, ABI Research expects the growing availability of IoT-centric Wi-Fi 7 solutions to arrive in 2026, following Ceva’s announcement of its Ceva-Waves Wi-Fi 7 1×1 client IP in October 2025. These more IoT-centric solutions will help provide more deterministic connectivity for a range of devices that are also seeking to integrate Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities. More broadly, the Wi-Fi 7 rollout will continue to accelerate in mainstream devices such as smartphones, tablets, PCs, and TVs.

Of course, there are many other developments in the connectivity industry. New entrants such as NearLink are gaining traction in China, while other technologies such as Wirepas and NR+ are gaining success across applications such as smart metering. Meanwhile, there is continued innovation in ultra-low power solutions, enabling battery-free ambient IoT solutions to flourish, while many technologies are becoming multi-functional, e.g., UWB that can provide fine-ranging, radar and sensing, and low-latency data communications. Meanwhile, new use cases such Extended Reality (XR) and healthcare require a growing diversity of solutions that require compact, high-performance networking or ultra-low power with enhanced link budget. Further demands on range, throughput, size reductions, edge AI capabilities, cost, and reliability are all driving the connectivity market in different directions. This is causing many challenges, including:

• Differentiation and Return on Investment (ROI): If one takes the Wi-Fi market as an example, the pace of innovation has accelerated rapidly in recent years, with Wi-Fi 6, Wi-Fi 6E, and Wi-Fi 7 all arriving within a few years of each other, and now Wi-Fi 8 is on the horizon. 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 ROI on their investments when the product lifecycle is shorter. This requires clearer messaging on what protocols are optimized for specific applications, and may become increasingly challenging as the market shifts away from pure throughput messaging toward a greater emphasis on reliability.
• Spectrum Divergence: The ongoing battleground for the 6 GHz band appears to be heating up rather than abating, potentially fracturing the ecosystem in Wi-Fi 7, and in the future Wi-Fi 8, between the 6 GHz-compatible and non-6 GHz-compatible variants across different regions. This has the potential to eradicate some of the key previous benefits of Wi-Fi technology in terms of global availability and a relatively consistent set of features across all devices globally. The potential of reversing course anywhere that 6 GHz has already been granted would be disastrous due to the already swift rollout of the technology in many mainstream devices. Meanwhile, with Bluetooth® targeting operation in higher bands, UWB requiring a favorable regulatory environment, and the regional divergence of sub-GHz technologies, this limits the performance of Wi-Fi HaLow in certain regions, so the regulatory landscape will continue to pose problems in 2026 and beyond.
• Interoperability: The growing diversity of technologies brings greater interoperability challenges. If we take UWB as an example, while there are signs of closer collaboration and many partnerships exist today, UWB development is also contingent on a number of different standards organizations and consortia, including the IEEE, the UWB Alliance, the FiRa Consortium, the Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA), the Car Connectivity Consortium (CCC), omlox, and the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), as well as a range of different Integrated Circuit (IC) vendors and solution providers that offer proprietary solutions tailored to specific verticals. In the longer term, it will be key for this collaboration to increase, much like today where the development of Bluetooth® technology is in the hands of the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG). It will also be key that there is no regional split of the technology development process to ensure global compatibility, something that has been key to the success of Wi-Fi and Bluetooth®. Furthermore, as UWB diversifies across different elements, including fine-ranging, sensing and radar, data communications, and highly tailored localization solutions, it risks further fragmentation and interoperability issues over time if these developments remain siloed.
• Growing Battleground Between Different Technologies: Competition is intensifying across multiple technologies and end markets. If we take audio as an example, in addition to proprietary wireless now being used in mainstream solutions, there is the continued innovation around Bluetooth® through Low Energy (LE) Audio and HDT, the emergence of low-power Wi-Fi, the ongoing developments of UWB audio, and regional variants such as NearLink now gaining traction in earbuds. Vendors will need to more effectively position their solutions against the competition as multiple technologies are now capable of addressing each use case.