Officially, Wi-Fi 8 is known as IEEE 802.11bn or Ultra High Reliability (UHR) Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN). The key word in that mouthful of a name is reliability. Instead of chasing higher speeds, which is what Wi-Fi 7 was all about, Wi-Fi 8 is designed to deliver a more consistent and dependable connection.
You may have read that Wi-Fi 8 will be much faster, up to 100 Gigabits per second (Gbps). This speed boost would be accomplished using a technology already used in some 5G implementations called millimeter wave (mmWave). That's the theory, anyway. In practice, mmWave promises to be hard to implement. Many people expect, as do I, that if mmWave does appear, it will be in an even later protocol called Wi-Fi 8E. I don't expect to see mmWave in devices this decade.
The good news is Wi-Fi 8 is poised to stabilize our wireless experience by prioritizing reliability and efficiency over raw throughput. And as router manufacturers continue to perfect their implementations of Wi-Fi 7, those devices will also become more stable.
Wi-Fi 8 will maintain the same maximum physical layer rate of 23 Gbps as Wi-Fi 7, utilizing the familiar 2.4 GHz, 5 GHz, and 6 GHz frequency bands. The real innovation lies in how Wi-Fi 8 optimizes these existing resources to provide a superior user experience.
