Wi-Fi 8 Explained: Why IEEE's Next Wireless Standard Skips the Speed Race
IEEE's next wireless LAN standard, internally called Ultra High Reliability (UHR) and marketed as Wi-Fi 8, is not chasing a higher top speed number. Instead, it targets consistent throughput and lower latency in crowded, interference-heavy environments. That's a notable shift after several generations where headline speed was the main selling point. What's Different About Wi-Fi 8 Most of the raw specifications carried over from Wi-Fi 7 remain unchanged in Wi-Fi 8: maximum theoretical data rates, the number of spatial streams, 4096-QAM modulation, the supported frequency bands, and the 320MHz channel width are all roughly the same. On paper, that makes Wi-Fi 8 look like a minor update. The real change shows up in a different metric. According to figures cited from IEEE documentation, throughput measured across varying signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) conditions improves by around 25% compared to Wi-Fi 7. In plain terms, that means better performance spec...