By Claus Hetting, WiFi NOW CEO & Chairman
While leading chipset vendors have already launched Wi-Fi 8 silicon – and with device manufacturers racing to announce their first products – the IEEE 802.11 working group is still adhering to its tried-and-true four-year cadence for delivering yet another acclaimed Wi-Fi standard. Qualcomm’s VP of Technical Standards Rolf de Vegt says work on Wi-Fi 8 is proceeding according to plan with early Wi-Fi 8 products expected to materialise next year. Meanwhile, work has started on the next standards release, he says.
So when can we expect Wi-Fi 8 devices to reach the market? If you only follow mainstream tech media’s Wi-Fi 8 news coverage, you may actually have a somewhat skewed impression of Wi-Fi 8 timelines. Yes, major chipset vendors are already making Wi-Fi 8 platforms available to developers and some device manufacturers – most recently TP-Link – have already announced dates for the release of their first Wi-Fi 8 products. Meanwhile, the IEEE 802.11 working group is adhering to a much less compressed timeline for finalising the Wi-Fi 8 standard itself.
“We’re making good progress and the earliest – but likely – date for the approval of the Draft 2.0 version of 802.11bn is the upcoming IEEE 802.11 working group meeting in Montreal, Canada, in July. After Draft 2.0, most of the work is typically bug fixing, which often ends up resulting in another handful of approved drafts. Then there’s a long gap before the final 802.11bn standard is approved. Right now, we expect final approvals of IEEE 802.11bn to happen in May of 2028. We expect to see the first Wi-Fi 8 products launched sometime next year,” Rolf de Vegt says. Historically, Draft 2.0 has represented the point at which most core technical features are considered stable enough for product development.
And although some vendors may have announced products a little earlier than usual, both the IEEE’s and Wi-Fi Alliance’s standardisation timelines are unchanged and follow the usual four-year cadence between major standards releases. Chipsets and the first devices typically arrive well before certification programs are launched. Wi-Fi Alliance is expected to launch its Wi-Fi 8 certification program at CES 2028, several months before final approval of IEEE 802.11bn.
Meanwhile, a number of other IEEE 802.11 standards look promising, says Rolf de Vegt. “The Integrated Millimeter Wave IEEE 802.11bq task group is converging on several topics. The idea is to include millimeter wave into the framework for Multi-Link Operation (MLO), so that 60 GHz connectivity can be added as another link. This could become one of the features of the next Wi-Fi standard. The Ambient Power IEEE 802.11bp task group has approved significant amounts of draft specification text and is making progress on feature details. The group now targets Draft 1.0 for September of this year,” he says.
Ambient power enables battery-less devices to harvest energy directly from surrounding RF signals or other external power sources. At the latest IEEE 802.11 working group meeting, members successfully demonstrated a Wi-Fi device communicating with an ambient power tag, which was powered solely by the RF energy emitted by the Wi-Fi device, Rolf de Vegt explains.
Promising work is also proceeding within a new study group on ‘AI Offload’. AI Offload facilitates offloading of AI inferencing from Wi-Fi-enabled clients to Wi-Fi APs equipped with embedded AI compute capabilities or other edge AI devices. Meanwhile, IEEE 802.11 has begun developing plans for future work on the next major Wi-Fi standard with key use cases already emerging: AI‑Driven Applications, Immersive & Interactive Media, Industrial Automation & Robotics, Mission‑Critical Operations, Mobile AP Ecosystem, Residential Broadband, Hyper‑Connected IoT/AIoT, and Transportation.
Actual Wi-Fi 9-generation standards development (for mainstream frequency bands below 7 GHz) is likely to begin in early 2027 and will take place within a new IEEE 802.11 task group, Rolf de Vegt says.
/Claus.
