By Claus Hetting, WiFi NOW CEO & Chairman

The world is grappling with a litany of challenging business conditions – including tariffs, new regulations, geopolitical instability, memory chip shortages, and more – which means Wi-Fi 8 adoption will need a fresh approach and not least a little ‘humble pie’. The Wi-Fi 8 use case messaging needs to be right while new extensions to the standard to serve legacy clients and reduce power consumption will be important, MediaTek’s James Chen said at WWC Mountain View on April 14.

Geopolitical turmoil and regulatory restrictions seem to be the order of the day and all the while, the Wi-Fi industry has already begun work on bringing the next Wi-Fi standard to market. According to James Chen, VP Product & Technology Marketing at MediaTek, the current business environment is the most challenging we’ve seen in over thirty years. This means new launches require a substantially more patient and innovative approach than what the industry has typically relied on in the past.

“The situation with Wi-Fi 8 is unique also because the standard itself will require us to develop new messaging, whereas in the past it was mostly about peak speed. Can I reasonably explain to my 82-year-old mother what Wi-F 8 is about and why she should care? Because unless we can distill our messaging to that level, service providers and makers of consumer equipment won’t know how to do it either. We need to help them,” James Chen said.

MediaTek says Wi-Fi 8 famously contains a long list of features but that most of them ultimately can be boiled down to the following handful of distinct benefits: Making AI-based services work better (because AI in particular depends on uplink data and Wi-Fi 8 improves uplink), faster connectivity in more locations within your home, better performance and handoffs for mesh, better network reliability, and reduced power consumption.

“All of this is not too hard to explain, but perhaps the bigger challenge is that for all the Wi-Fi 8 goodness to shine through, we will of course need Wi-Fi 8 to run on both the network access point and client sides. And this will take time. It took a full three years from launch before 40% of all phones and PCs shipped with Wi-Fi 7 support. So for Wi-Fi 8 this means we’ll be into 2030 before we achieve 40% penetration. And then what should we do in the meantime? That’s an important question,” he says.

One possible answer – says James Chen – is to introduce benefits that are not limited to Wi-Fi 8 clients but deliver similar performance improvements for Wi-Fi 6 and Wi-Fi 7 clients. “For example: MediaTek’s approach is to introduce a standards extension we call ‘DSO+’ which allows Wi-Fi 8’s DSO feature to operate with non-Wi-Fi 8 clients. We already demonstrated this to our customers earlier this year, and it works perfectly,” he says.

Last but not least, power consumption is increasingly becoming a design and performance bottleneck as Wi-Fi standards mature and expand. “We’re big believers in digital pre-distortion to linearise FEMs and we’ve now improved our DPD solution together with one of the world’s largest FEM providers. This will bring the power consumption down by at least 20% compared to Wi-Fi 7 to begin with, later probably more. This has nothing to do with Wi-Fi 8 standardised features as such but of course extremely important for any future Wi-Fi product especially with regards to reducing costs,” James Chen said.

/Claus.