Meet Wi-Fi 8, which trades speed for a more reliable experience

A new generation of Wi-Fi, Wi-Fi 8, is currently under development in secret. The focus this time no Pure speed, but improved user experience.

Wi-Fi 8 is currently called IEEE 802.11 billion ultra-high reliability and is still several years away from implementation. Wireless technology is in a constant state of improvement: Each step in Wi-Fi’s evolution has taken years to discuss, approve, and deploy. Wi-Fi 7, the “current” standard, hasn’t even been officially approved yet.

But that hasn’t stopped Wi-Fi 8’s development behind the scenes, and we already know some of the details. MediaTek’s Filogic wireless division has announced some of the features you can expect, but it’s important to note that the final details won’t be finalized until the final specifications are released around September 2028.

What are the keywords that should come to mind in the context of Wi-Fi 8? Not peak throughput; valid throughput.

Further reading: The 5 most dangerous Wi-Fi attacks and how to deal with them

Wi-Fi 8 looks a lot like Wi-Fi 7

According to the Wi-Fi Alliance and MediaTek, the United States is not the driving force behind the wireless evolution. Instead, it’s China: the country has 650 million broadband subscribers and more than a quarter of households have a 1Gbps broadband connection. Overall, the average connection speed was 487.6Mbps, an increase of 18% in one year.

Theoretically, 802.11 billion/Wi-Fi 8 departure (Word documentthrough IEEE) provides sufficient wireless bandwidth to accommodate broadband gateways delivering multi-gigabit per second, and allows for the additional capabilities provided by Ethernet. Everything RF explained The 2022 document, known as the Project Authorization Request (PAR), will provide a minimum aggregate throughput of 100Gbps.

The PAR has since been approved in 2023 and the working group has begun finalizing more details. MediaTek believes that as of November 2024, Wi-Fi 8 will be nearly identical to Wi-Fi 7 in several key areas: The maximum physical layer (PHY) rate will be the same, 2,880Mbps x 8, or 23Gbits/s. It will also use the same three frequency bands (2.4, 5 and 6GHz) and the same 4096 QAM modulation, with a maximum channel bandwidth of 320MHz.

(Of course, Wi-Fi 8 routers won’t get 23Gbps of bandwidth. According to MediaTek, actual peak throughput in a “clean” or lab environment is only about 80% of assumed peak throughput, and actual peak throughput The volume is only about 80% of the assumed peak throughput.

In short, Wi-Fi 8 should provide the same wireless bandwidth as Wi-Fi 7 using the same channels and the same modulation. Each Wi-Fi standard is also backwards compatible with its predecessor. However, Wi-Fi 8 will change the way your client device (such as a PC or mobile phone) interacts with multiple access points.

Think of this as an evolution in the way laptops communicate with home network devices. Over time, Wi-Fi has evolved from a single channel of communication between a laptop and a router. Channel hopping routes different clients to different frequency bands. When Wi-Fi 6 was developed, a dedicated 6GHz channel was added, sometimes as a dedicated “backhaul” between home access points. Mesh networks are more common these days, providing your laptop with a variety of access points, channels, and frequencies to choose from.

How Wi-Fi 8 will improve Wi-Fi technology

MediaTek sees multiple opportunities to improve coordination between access points and devices. (To be fair, we’re counting these as MediaTek efforts, just because we can’t be sure they’ll ultimately receive overall approval from the Wi-Fi 8 802.11 billion working group.)

Coordinated Space Reuse (Co-SR): This technology was first implemented in Wi-Fi 6 as spatial reuse. The problem arises when there is a transmission power difference between an access point that is “talking” to a nearby device and a second access point that is also far away. If the first access point reduces its power to communicate with a nearby device, that access point will not be able to “hear” it.

MediaTek says Wi-Fi 8’s Co-SR is a “maturity” in spatial reuse technology that will solve the problem by allowing access points to communicate with each other and coordinate their power output. “Our preliminary experiments show that Co-SR can increase overall system throughput by 15% to 25%,” MediaTek said.

Coordinated Beamforming (Co-BF): There’s a trend here: taking early Wi-Fi technology and extending it to multiple access points. Spatial zeroing is a feature introduced in 802.11ac (Wi-Fi 5) that allows routers to essentially stop sending signals in certain directions. By doing this, the router sends the signal where it is requested and avoids interfering with devices that don’t want to communicate with the router.

The technology attempts to solve a fairly common problem in connected homes or public spaces with Wi-Fi service: two devices in close proximity to each other. Coordinated beamforming allows access points to communicate with each other, figure out which device needs the signal and which does not, and adjust the mesh access points to “steer” the signal away from devices that are not communicating with the network, essentially refusing to transmit to where it is area.

MediaTek said: “Coordinated beamforming (Co-BF) in next-generation MediaTek Filogic provides significant throughput enhancements, with a 20% increase in throughput in a mesh network setup with one control AP and one proxy AP. to 50%.

Dynamic subchannel operations: You probably know that the latest devices support the latest wireless standards, such as Wi-Fi 7. In the past, this information was passed to the router and stored there.

In most cases this won’t be a problem. But in the case of multiple different devices downloading the same file, DSO will create a dynamic scenario where more advanced devices will receive sub-channels to download the file faster. The difference between the old approach and Wi-Fi 8’s DSO is that the access point is able to make decisions, “understand” each device’s capabilities and its requirements, and route data accordingly.

MediaTek believes that DSO can increase data throughput by 80% compared to without this technology.

New data rate: You may not know what it is MCS index,Wi-Fi modulation coding scheme. It’s basically a table that helps your Wi-Fi router determine the link speed so that you can actually connect and transfer data without errors. If throughput slows down as you move around the house, part of the reason is that your device and router “determine” the connection speed your device should use.

MediaTek believes that the problem is that the “downgrade” to slower speeds is too great and that additional levels should be introduced, such as 16-QAM with a 2/3 encoding rate. The idea is not to introduce dramatic drops and increases in throughput as you move your phone or laptop around the house, but smaller increments. MediaTek again believes that these finer MCS divisions can increase overall transfer rates by 5% to 30%.

change of pace

Likewise, the development of Wi-Fi 8 depends on how quickly the standard moves through the regulatory process. Wi-Fi 7 (802.11be) is expected to be approved in September this year, but it has not yet been approved. Sony’s India may not approve PlayStation 5 Because the country has not approved the 6GHz wireless channel that the Wi-Fi 7 standard relies on. This will also hinder Wi-Fi 8.

Wireless standards take about six years to develop, and impatient hardware manufacturers rarely wait. As MediaTek notes, Wi-Fi 7 products will begin shipping in late 2023, although the standard has not yet been officially ratified. Part of the reason is that the IEEE committee responsible for the standard rarely makes significant changes between approval of a draft standard and the final standard. For Wi-Fi 8, the first products are expected to be available in early 2028, but final approvals should be completed by the end of that year.

It’s worth noting, however, that the race for ever-increasing speeds is currently on hold in two different areas of the PC market. Qualcomm and Intel CPUs have slowed down their pursuit of higher clock speeds in favor of lower power consumption. For Wi-Fi 8, the focus now seems to be improving the overall user experience first.

Correction: Wi-Fi 8 will use the 2.4GHz band instead of the 2 and 4GHz bands. The author sincerely apologizes for this error.