Wi-Fi 8 is the first wireless upgrade in years that isn't chasing speed • Hacker News Board

Re: Wi-Fi 8 is the first wireless upgrade in years that isn't chasing speed

#291

Post by jiveturkey » Tue, Aug 25, 2026, 4:36 AM UTC

MayeulC wrote: post #192

I read trough the planned improvements a while ago, and came to the conclusion that most would be mostly useful in ultra crowded environments such as stadiums, etc, so not very useful for a consumer. Would you agree? Roaming improvements are nice, though in practice most firmwares already implement something similar AFAIK? OpenWrt & Ubiquity Unifi devices do, though there is no cross vendor protocol. Curious to see h…

> all APs identify as the same BSSID, and decide between them who answers a client

That is decidedly not a solution. Neighboring APs necessarily need to be on different channels, to avoid Co-Channel Interference (CCI). An AP doesn't answer just on BSSID but also on a specific channel.

Re: Wi-Fi 8 is the first wireless upgrade in years that isn't chasing speed

#292

Post by hurricanepootis » Tue, Aug 25, 2026, 5:20 PM UTC

cogman10 wrote: post #145

smashed wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait till you see the number of actual chip vendors. There is about 3.. Broadcom, Qualcomm and MediaTek. Together they control I believe 100% of wifi chips used in routers and APs. Often it's sold as a package / system on chip so it's also the main cpu. On the client side there is a little bit more competition but not much.

Client side don't you just add Realtek and Intel? I don't think almost anyone else does wifi chips.

Realtek wifi chips suck, their drivers are always buggy

Re: Wi-Fi 8 is the first wireless upgrade in years that isn't chasing speed

#293

Post by devilbunny » Wed, Aug 26, 2026, 1:18 AM UTC

lucb1e wrote: post #225

devilbunny wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As is MoCA, which in my experience is a lot higher-speed and more reliably so. People tend to want speed, speed, speed, but tons of use cases are totally fine with a reliable 100 Mbps. For a lot of remote monitoring stuff, even 1 kbps is enough if it works reliably . Not everything needs to serve up a webpage.

for anyone else wondering, that new acronym means coax > MoCA (stands for Multimedia over Coax Alliance) is a technology that uses the existing coaxial cables

It’s been around for quite some time. I assumed it would be known around here. The lowest level is 100 Mbps and I keep telling people on Reddit that 100 Mbps is plenty for so many use cases. I wouldn’t install it on a new plant, but if it’s there, use it.

Re: Wi-Fi 8 is the first wireless upgrade in years that isn't chasing speed

#294

Post by rrrrrrrrrrrryan » Wed, Aug 26, 2026, 3:29 PM UTC

kjellsbells wrote: post #202

Having WiFi 8 (or even 7) on your access point is only really useful if you have a population of clients that can use the features it offers. I regularly sample the devices attached to residential wifi routers and the facts are grim: in a house of 40+ devices, two can do wifi 7, about 10% can do 6Ghz, 50 to 60% can do 5GHz but not 6GHz, and a core rump of 50% of the devices are stuck on 2.4GHz. I suspect this is beca…

This is true if you only have one access point.

If you have a mesh system with more than one access point, your network benefits greatly by using WiFi 7 (or 8, now) as a dedicated wireless backhaul that connects the access points to each other.

Re: Wi-Fi 8 is the first wireless upgrade in years that isn't chasing speed

#295

Post by lucb1e » Wed, Aug 26, 2026, 8:31 PM UTC

avhception wrote: post #272

lucb1e wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They use the words WiFi (or, as we say in Germany, WLAN) and "Internet" almost interchangeably. I was helping our neighbor with WiFi issues. They asked at some point if a "WLAN-Kabel" would solve the issue :) The sad part is that they realized the mistake a minute later, and since I didn't say anything but just answered the question (I understood what they meant, no point correcting the technicality), they assumed…

It really doesn't help that a part of our attention-economy has hopped on the "what (the government/big tech/car company) doesn't want you to know!11" bandwagon and constantly feeds into this notion that there is this great ominous evil cabal working against you.

Yeah exactly :/