By Claus Hetting, WiFi NOW CEO & Chairman
What can we expect from CES 2026?
We’ll of course be covering the news from CES (although we will not be there in person) and as usual, we expect a number of Wi-Fi innovations to be launched or on display in Las Vegas. We know for a fact that MediaTek will be demonstrating its Wi-Fi 8 platform at CES, and we expect there will likely be other Wi-Fi 8 demos. We’re in a kind of marketing no-mans-land at the moment being sufficiently into the Wi-Fi 7 era to make most Wi-Fi 7 announcements not very eye-catching while Wi-Fi 8 is still a couple of years out. That won’t stop vendors touting Wi-Fi 8 tech – as we can see from ASUS pre-CES announcement below. We also know that there will be many Wi-Fi HaLow-related announcements relating to new client devices in particular, which we will cover in detail. Stay tuned.
ASUS jumps on the Wi-Fi 8 band wagon ahead of CES
Wi-Fi 8 is a great eye-catcher these days if you’re in the networking business – and ASUS is now ‘teasing’ a new Wi-Fi 8 router ahead of the 2026 version CES in Las Vegas. We don’t exactly know what this means except for the fact that it is bound to draw some attention to ASUS, famous especially for its high-performance ‘Republic of Gamers’ (or ROG) consumer-grade routers.
There doesn’t appear to be any official press release from ASUS on the subject only a few non-specific news reports, like this one. Apparently, ASUS has released a video clip showing a glimpse of a Wi-Fi 8 ROG router. We’ll cover this in more detail as more information emerges – if any. One looming question – that we’ve asked here – is this: How are you supposed to know that you’re using Wi-Fi 8 for connectivity? Since there’s no PHY speed increase for the new standard, you’d have to use some other means of identifying the connectivity standard used.
Plume & Japan’s J:COM team up for Wi-Fi 7
This happened in December – but we missed it – so we want to make amends: J:COM and Plume has announced the introduction of J:COM’s first Wi-Fi 7 service for residential customers in Japan. The launch features J:COM’s own Wi-Fi 7 home gateway combined with Plume’s AI and Cloud-based Wi-Fi optimisation solution, Plume says in a press release. J:COM is Japan’s largest MSO (cable operator) serving 5.7 million subscribers across the country, Plume says.
Plume also rightly points out the importance of serving homes with a mix of of Wi-Fi 7, Wi-Fi 6, and Wi-Fi 5-based devices as legacy devices are still very common. “J:COM’s Wi-Fi 7 service uses Plume’s AI platform to adapt to these conditions that Wi-Fi 7 alone cannot solve and create the best connection for every device,” Plume says. J:COM subscribers will be able to manager their home Wi-Fi services through a J:COM-branded Plume Home app, the company says.
India rumoured to ‘formalise Wi-Fi offload rules’
We’re frankly not totally sure what this means, but this Indian publication says the Indian government is ‘moving to formalise an offload framework’. Last year, India ostensibly decided to delicense the lower half of the 6 GHz band (we wrote about it here) which would obviously be an excellent source of additional spectrum for ‘offload’ of cellular traffic. Is India planning to formalise some way of bringing public Wi-Fi and cellular services together? That’s what it sounds like. We will be following this story closely.
/Claus.
