TP-Link conducts Wi-Fi 8 trials, promises better reliability and lower latency

> While some draft specifications could be released in 2027, the official Wi-Fi 8 standard is projected to be finalized only in mid-2028. Commercial products that officially support the new standard are not expected to reach the market until late 2028 at the earliest.

I bet companies will release WiFi 8 products even when it's still a draft, just as they did with WiFI 7.

I upgraded my home setup to WiFi 7 a few weeks ago, and after being a WiFi hater for so long, was actually surprised at how much better it was over my previous experiences with WiFi. With MLO clients get 2-3ms latency with 2.5Gbit links, I'm all for WiFi 8 trying to reduce the latency further, I don't need more speed.

>I bet companies will release WiFi 8 products even when it's still a draft, just as they did with WiFI 7.

No need to be left behind. They can already release WiFi 9 products. /s

I have a computer with a 1G Ethernet phy designed before everything was ratified. Not great. I'll make sure to wait

If you want reliable Wifi at home, get yourself Ubiquity access points and throw away TP-Link. The issue is not the protocol. After many years of unplugging and plugging back in my TP-link router I know that they are cursed.

But: the Omada gear is awesome. I threw away all of Ubiquity stuff and can operate without cloud.

I don't even have Wi-Fi 7 yet.

It's tough. On one hand side, TP-Link has some weird issues. On the other, I spent a while debugging an issue with their engineers and they seem to actually care to improve things. Maybe the lower price is worth it sometimes.

I don't need lower latency, I need better congestion management. WiFi in busy areas (like airports) sucks.

Yeah I was gonna say, I upgraded from my older Unifi stuff to TP-Link Omada and have had no issues.

Anecdote time - I've had their BE550 Wifi 7 router for over a year now and it's been rock solid. Easily does 2Gbps over wifi, never had to reset it once despite having 40+ devices connected to it all the time, the 4x 2.5Gbps ports are super useful.....it is one of their more expensive devices so maybe that's why, but generally it's been very very solid.

What I have read is that with Wifi-7 (MLO, dynamic channels), TP-Link is much improved.

I recently torrented a movie on a airport wifi while waiting for a plane and it worked so well, even when walking around the airport to the plane. I was impressed.

Or better yet, Aruba Instant On. Enterprise hardware for SOHO money, truly plug and play, rock solid, no tinkering involved (which can be both good and bad depending on one's goals).

Don't worry, by the time we get cheap mass produced Wi-Fi 7 4x4 MIMO routers, we'll have Wi-Fi 9 ready to be drafted.

I haven't encountered issues with airports' WiFi in many years, at least not the ones I fly from in Europe.

What airports have you seen issues lately? It's one thing I haven't thought about in a long time.

Use a remote server for such vile behavior.

Nah, that's too much work, public wifi is great for that.

I've always had good experiences with TP-Link, just not their stock firmware. They're cheap and reliable OpenWRT devices.

Can relate. I went through various consumer ish access points until I got tired of it and splurged on an Ubiquiti.

Haven't had any wifi problems since. To the point I don't remember what wifi standard my home is on :)

Too bad they may or may not have given up on the cloud connectivity requirement. I've been told (even on here) they have, but I've also been told that you can disable it after setup instead of setting up without any stinking cloud.

Say, did Ubiquity stuff work during the AWS outage?

Better yet, buy actual enterprise gear even if it's a generation behind. You can find decent Aruba, Ruckus and Cisco kit on eBay going for decent prices.

Wifi-8 will be great. Finally we get seamless controlled handovers between accesspoints that can be controlled from infrastucture side.

With MAP 2.4GHz can serve as long range network that can be filled with High-Rate 5GHz / 6GHz cells. And all of them can be utilized in parallel.

802.11be (Wifi-7) still lacks this.

> I bet companies will release WiFi 8 products even when it's still a draft, just as they did with WiFI 7.

They must. Otherwise it cannot be tested within the labs.

And producing chips before a standard is finalized is usually no problem at all: there are gates within the standardization process where the will be no more changes that are relevant for the silicon.

These 802.11n-draft APs were a singular fuckup regarding this.

can you explain why using torrents is vile behavior?

I had a tp-link router for a few years and never had any problems with it.

As far as I know devices like Access Points only need the Controller to be configured or monitored. Once they are configured they work completely without it.

My Ubiquity stuff worked fine the whole time, but I do have the Dream Machine as my router/video surveillance hub.

None of my ubiquity stuff uses their cloud stuff at all.

Agreed. I have 4 Omada APs in my house — 3 wired PoE and 1 mesh.

I haven’t thought about it since I set it up, three years ago. 100% reliability, seamless handoff between APs.

Without a personal opinion one way or the other, I would assume the gripe is with congesting the public network as opposed to the choice of public domain documentaries you downloaded.

> Wi-Fi 7 4x4 MIMO routers

Are there any such routers? And even if there are, are there any clients? The last 4x4 MIMO Wi-Fi client I can remember was the Asus PCE-AC88, a Wi-Fi 5 NIC from 2016.

I now run a TP-Link free household. I was disappointed with every one of my TPL purchases over the years, both on routers and client adapters.

I'm still waiting for 6 GHz APs to be the same price as 5 GHz. Can't find a basic AP under €100 yet.

I own two consumer-grade Deco XE75 access points which I purchased several years ago as the most cost-effective 6E compatible access points available. They have proven to be exceptionally reliable.

Although I have previously encountered significant issues with WiFi, I now do not see a need to replace these devices despite the availability of WiFi 7.

“Linux ISOs”

I use TP-link switches exclusively as they turned out far more reliable than any other I had.

For wifi I have been using ASUS's AI Mesh. Not that impressed tbh so looking to change to something else in the next upgrade cycle.

You can already make a MAP network, and any modern client will automatically hop between APs pretty fast, based on which one has the strongest signal. There's a common misconception that devices will cling to one AP while better ones are available, which hasn't been true in many years now from my experience.

Infrastructure side handovers are great for load balancing though, for enterprise networks with very high client density.

In my experience Apple clients have been incredibly clingy to 6ghz bands, while much better 5ghz was available.

What does that mean, that the controller won't work without a cloud account? :)

It doesn't really matter which part in the chain requires the stinking cloud as long as they sneak it in somewhere.

Speaking of which, I just bought a Razer mouse again because I've read they gave up on the login requirement for configuring your blinkenlights. But they didn't. They invented a 'guest login' instead.

Burned twice so far.

Similar transition for me. Basic dual AP setup that I took from first gen UAPs (wifi 4) to U7 Pro. I think I have only one client (a Lenovo laptop) that connects with wifi 7, but even the wifi 6 devices are screamers now; my phone can get 600mbps symmetric with line of sight or 200-300mbps from two floors away. Just bonkers.

I think it's more a case of don't use cheap consumer grade hardware in any kind of remotely demanding scenario.

I have "enterprise" TP-Link equipment for my house which I bought 3 years ago now and am very happy with it, in particular I'm using:

- 4x EAP245 Access Points

- 1x SG3428 Switch (the APs came with PoE injectors and I wanted a fan-less switch, hence why the switch is not PoE enabled)

I rent out a room on my property and have my tenant on a separate VLAN to the main house. I also have my IoT devices on a separate VLAN.

I use a generic PC with pfSense as my "router".

My only complaint is that their Omada Controller software doesn't want to run as a Windows Service (I'm not interested in trying to manage a Linux box). Fortunately, it's not required at all, but is useful for centralized configuration management and facilitation of handover of WiFi clients between APs.

Before I moved into my current large-ish place, I used "cheap" ISP supplied TP-Link routers with WiFi, and aside from limited speed capabilities, were 100% reliable for me, in particular I used the following two models:

- TL-WR840N

- Archer C20.

I also use a few cheap (but again fully reliable) 5 port and 8 port TP-Link 1GB/s switches, for example under my desk in my office to allow both my laptop and desktop to share the single CAT6 cable to the room.

Before buying the "enterprise" TP-Link equipment I considered Ubiquiti, but the TP-Link stuff was less expensive, I liked the controller being optional and considering all my past TP-Link equipment's reliability was a non-issue, I was happy "to take a risk".

Perhaps worth noting that 802.11bn is dubbed "Ultra High Reliability (UHR)":

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11bn

So they're explicitly look at more than just adding more bits per second.

> based on which one has the strongest signal.

That's not what you want to have in an enterprise environment.

A roaming decision must be based on the signal level readings from both sides from the infrastructure side.

Everything else is gambling.

Oh to be clear I illegally downloaded copyrighted works of major movie studios while they had just hit the streaming sites.

I bought a UniFi Dream Router 7 some months ago, very happy with it so far.

You can run the controller locally or from the cloud. When it is running locally you have the option to tunnel to it through the cloud. It runs completely locally.

AFAICT, the controller is needed for fast roaming of clients.

> Not expected to arrive until 2028

> WiFi in busy areas (like airports) sucks.

This is part of what opening up the 6 GHz was about.

But there are also provisions in newer standards like Target Wake Time: the client can be told to sleep for a while, not using radio spectrum (and also saving battery).

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11ah#Target_Wake_Time

OFDMA allows multiple clients to use the same frequency at the same time (using sub-channels):

* https://airheads.hpe.com/blogs/antar1/2020/10/19/why-is-ofdm...

* https://community.tp-link.com/us/home/stories/detail/201

> When it is running locally you have the option to tunnel to it through the cloud.

So can I just ignore that option or do they make me register to the stinking cloud just in case?

IIRC the controller is needed to configure your AP anyway when you first set it up.

I wonder how consumer Wi-Fi 8 products will be marketed.

“Now More Reliable!” in a spiky red circle alongside the unchanged highly theoretical bandwidth numbers?

Seems to me its mostly a version focussed on the enterprise, just like wifi 6 was. I suspect many consumers will just skip it like they did wifi 6 as it brings very little for them. Wifi 7 is a big jump from wifi 5 (and 6) in performance but its still not complete, way too many devices that only support dual band and not supporting the various forms of MLO properly. Still no open source firmwares supporting it either.

> I bet companies will release WiFi 8 products even when it's still a draft, just as they did with WiFI 7.

They've been doing this since the dawn of wifi pretty much. I distinctly remember seeing "802.11 draft n" being printed an all the hot new and faster wifi cards back in the day.

I have the UAP-AC-LR and if you only need basic AP functionality you can even configure it from the phone (no cloud). 99% sure no cloud stuff is needed when self-hosting the controller. May have changed since then, though.

They're not necessarily different things. Increased latency can happen as a result of congestion on the band.

In fact, I don’t even want it at my house.

I have a lot of low bandwidth devices that love to connect to a router further away and congest it. Makes the devices I actually care around run much slower.

The only solution is restarting my network one-by-one so they have a better chance of getting the right device.

Anecdotally, I switched from Ubiquiti to TP-Link and am very happy with the decision.

Ubiquity stuff was giving me constant buffer bloat issues and it was a pain to do basic configuration for. Just too many options.

TP-LInk generally works just fine as long as the WiFi channel is clear.

My deco seems to be really poor at picking a channel at boot up. When I have performance issues running the optimizer almost always moves it to a different channel and solves my issues.

Bought their new long range bluetooth dongle, works better for longer than any other on the market I have tried. Competitively priced.

As an aside, what happened to the rumors about TP-Link stuff being compromised and used for botnetting by China? Was it true or unfounded?

I just ran the optimiser after reading your post and it changed the 2.4GHz channel - I think the main reason I've been so happy is that the laptops and smartphones I primarily use support 6GHz where there is no interference and channel selection doesn't matter.

They seem to suffer from all the same issues of out-of-date unsupported software releases that all the other consumer AP manufacturers have. But I haven't read anything which suggests more deliberate backdoors. Perhaps another HNer has. Personally, I've always installed OpenWRT for the superior support and updated packages, and TP-Link devices have been reliable platforms for that.

I'm now curious if upgrading from two Unifi U6 LR's to U7 Pro's would offer significant benefits for Wifi 6 endpoints.