Wi-Fi 7 vs Wi-Fi 8: What's Actually Different

Wi-Fi 7 and Wi-Fi 8 are not separated by a speed leap the way earlier generations were. The headline numbers on both standards — up to 46 Gbps of theoretical combined PHY rate, 320 MHz channels, 4096-QAM — are effectively the same, because Wi-Fi 8 (IEEE 802.11bn) was deliberately scoped around reliability rather than raw throughput. The real differences are in latency consistency, access-point coordination, and power efficiency, and because 802.11bn is still a draft standard, Wi-Fi 7 remains the only one of the two you can buy a finished, certified product for today.

What Wi-Fi 8 actually changes versus Wi-Fi 7

Every Wi-Fi generation since 802.11n has sold itself on bigger peak numbers. Wi-Fi 8 breaks that pattern on purpose. The IEEE 802.11 Working Group's own task group status reports describe the project's target as Ultra High Reliability (UHR), not a speed increase, and set out specific, measurable goals relative to Wi-Fi 7 (EHT): at least 25% higher throughput at a given signal quality, at least 25% lower 95th-percentile latency, and at least 25% lower frame loss, particularly during the handoffs between access points that cause the stutters and dropped calls most people associate with "bad Wi-Fi." The same task group documentation adds power-saving mechanisms for access points, including mobile ones, and improved peer-to-peer behavior, while requiring full backward compatibility with 2.4 GHz, 5 GHz and 6 GHz legacy devices.

In other words, Wi-Fi 8's job is to make the connection behave the same whether you're standing next to the router or at the far end of the house with a microwave running, not to double your top speed. That's a meaningfully different pitch than the one Wi-Fi 7 made when the Wi-Fi Alliance introduced it, and it's also why direct speed comparisons between the two standards are, by design, underwhelming.

Speed and throughput: why the numbers look identical

If you're searching for a speed gap, the official specification sheets won't give you one. TP-Link's own Wi-Fi 8 product page lists a maximum PHY rate of 46 Gbps for both Wi-Fi 7 and Wi-Fi 8, with 320 MHz as the top channel width for each and 160 MHz as the ceiling for the older Wi-Fi 6. ASUS's spec pages tell the same story at the product level: the ROG Rapture GT-BN98 spec sheet, its early Wi-Fi 8 router, is rated at 4x4 streams with 4096-QAM across 2.4 GHz, two 5 GHz bands and a 6 GHz band, totaling what ASUS labels "BN25000." Its Wi-Fi 7 sibling, the ROG Rapture GT-BE98, is rated 1,376 Mbps (2.4 GHz), 5,764 Mbps on each 5 GHz band, and 11,529 Mbps on 6 GHz — labeled "BE25000." Line the two spec tables up and the per-band numbers match exactly, because both routers are built around the same channel widths, stream counts and modulation scheme.

That's not a coincidence or a marketing shortcut. Wi-Fi 8's physical-layer ceiling wasn't raised because the bottleneck in most homes was never peak Mbps — it was consistency. TP-Link frames its own Wi-Fi 8 products around that same idea, advertising "up to 30% higher throughput at the same signal strength" and "up to 24% better interference handling" versus Wi-Fi 7, rather than a bigger top-line number. Those are TP-Link's own lab figures, not independently verified benchmarks, and the company notes results vary by router, client hardware and environment.

Latency and reliability: the real target of Wi-Fi 8

The IEEE 802.11bn task group's status reports are explicit about what the amendment is actually trying to fix. Its formally adopted targets, measured against EHT (Wi-Fi 7) operation, call for at least 25% higher throughput at a given SINR, at least 25% lower 95th-percentile latency, and at least 25% lower MPDU loss, with particular attention to the handoffs between access points in a mesh system — the exact moments when video calls freeze or game connections spike. The amendment also adds power-saving mechanisms for access points and improves peer-to-peer operation, while mandating coexistence with legacy 2.4/5/6 GHz devices.

Crucially, these are task-group design targets in an unfinished draft, not certified, independently measured results. The 25% figures describe what engineers are required to hit before the standard can be finalized, not a guarantee you'll see that improvement on day one of owning a Wi-Fi 8 router.

MLO today vs. AP coordination tomorrow

Multi-Link Operation is the feature most people already associate with Wi-Fi 7, and it's staying in Wi-Fi 8 rather than being replaced. The Wi-Fi Alliance describes MLO on its own Wi-Fi 7 page as letting a single device transmit and receive across multiple links at once, which the Alliance says increases throughput, cuts latency and improves reliability by letting traffic move to whichever band is free. We covered how that mechanism works in practice in our explainer on Wi-Fi 7's MLO implementation.

Wi-Fi 8 builds on top of that rather than reinventing it. Where Wi-Fi 7's MLO is about one client juggling multiple links to one access point, the features TP-Link lists for its Wi-Fi 8 hardware — Co-BF (coordinated beamforming), Co-SR (coordinated spatial reuse) and Co-TDMA (coordinated time-division access) — are about multiple access points in a mesh coordinating with each other so they stop stepping on each other's airtime. The Wi-Fi Alliance's own materials describe this direction for Wi-Fi 8 as access points "coordinating instead of competing for spectrum," which it says increases capacity in dense deployments like apartment buildings or offices where neighboring routers currently interfere with one another. TP-Link also lists coordinated Target Wake Time (TWT) and multi-AP coordination as Wi-Fi 8 additions that have no equivalent in Wi-Fi 7.

Frequency bands and channel widths

Both standards operate across the same three consumer bands — 2.4 GHz, 5 GHz and 6 GHz — and both top out at 320 MHz-wide channels, available only where regulators have opened the 6 GHz band for Wi-Fi. The IEEE 802.11bn amendment's formal scope statement covers carrier frequencies from 1 GHz up to 7.25 GHz, which leaves room for future low-band reliability features, but it does not add a new consumer band beyond what Wi-Fi 7 already uses, and it modifies both the PHY and MAC layers to add the Ultra High Reliability capability on top of the existing EHT framework.

Practically, that means a Wi-Fi 8 router sitting next to a Wi-Fi 7 router today will show identical band-speed ratings, as ASUS's own GT-BN98 and GT-BE98 spec sheets demonstrate. The ceiling hasn't moved; what's supposed to change is how efficiently that ceiling gets used when multiple devices and multiple access points are active at once.

Ratification and certification timeline

Wi-Fi 7 is finished business: the Wi-Fi Alliance's Wi-Fi CERTIFIED 7 program launched January 8, 2024, backed by a testbed from Broadcom, CommScope RUCKUS Networks, Intel, MaxLinear, MediaTek and Qualcomm. Wi-Fi 8 is not. According to IEEE 802.11 Working Group status reports, the 802.11bn project received its PAR approval in July 2023 and held its first task group meeting that November. Draft 1.0 passed its initial working-group letter ballot in July 2025, and Draft 2.0 followed in July 2026, with the September 2026 interim session in Kona, Hawaii resolving roughly 1,850 comments to produce Draft 2.1. The same reports project Draft 3.0's letter ballot for January 2027, Draft 4.0's sponsor ballot for May 2027, and final IEEE 802.11 Working Group and 802 Executive Committee approval for March 2028, with RevCom and IEEE-SA Standards Board approval projected for May 2028.

That timeline means Wi-Fi Alliance certification — the step that actually guarantees interoperability between brands, the way Wi-Fi 7 CERTIFIED does today — isn't expected until after final IEEE approval in 2028. Anything sold as "Wi-Fi 8" before then is built against a moving draft, not a finished spec.

Routers and devices you can buy right now

That hasn't stopped hardware from shipping. ASUS's ROG Rapture GT-BN98 — which we compared directly against its Wi-Fi 7 predecessor in our GT-BN98 vs. GT-BE98 router comparison — lists its wireless standard as "WiFi 8 (802.11bn) (Draft)" on ASUS's own spec page, with a disclaimer that the router's speeds are based on current 802.11ac/ax/be specifications rather than a finished 802.11bn, and that ASUS "makes no representations or warranties about this product's compatibility with future standards." TP-Link has taken the same pre-standard approach with its Archer 8 Ultra and Deco 8 Ultra, which its own Wi-Fi 8 product page lists at 19 Gbps and 22 Gbps tri-band ratings respectively, each with a 6 GHz band, multi-gig wired ports, and support for roughly 200 connected devices.

What neither company is shipping yet is a certified Wi-Fi 8 client device. Phones, laptops and other endpoints capable of actually using the draft standard's new coordination features are not yet on the market in meaningful numbers, so early Wi-Fi 8 routers currently serve Wi-Fi 7 and older clients at Wi-Fi 7-equivalent speeds, with the promised reliability gains arriving in firmware once the spec — and compatible client silicon — stabilizes.

Should you buy Wi-Fi 7 now, or wait for Wi-Fi 8?

For nearly everyone shopping for a router this year, Wi-Fi 7 is the safer buy. It's a ratified, Wi-Fi Alliance-certified standard with a mature device ecosystem, and — as the spec sheets above show — it already delivers the same peak channel width, modulation and theoretical throughput ceiling that early Wi-Fi 8 hardware does. There's no finished Wi-Fi 8 client hardware to pair with a Wi-Fi 8 router today, which means buying one now means paying an early-adopter premium for a draft implementation that ASUS itself won't promise compatibility with the eventual ratified standard.

The case for buying early Wi-Fi 8 hardware now is narrow: if you specifically want a hedge against future firmware-delivered reliability improvements on a router you were already planning to replace, and you're comfortable with a product built on a standard IEEE doesn't expect to finalize until roughly 2028, the extra cost might be worth it to you. For most households, including anyone running bandwidth-hungry AI tools — the kind of on-device and cloud AI workloads chipmakers and platform owners are now investing billions of dollars to support — a certified Wi-Fi 7 router bought today will perform identically to a draft Wi-Fi 8 router on raw speed, with none of the compatibility uncertainty. The better time to buy into Wi-Fi 8 specifically for its reliability gains is after Wi-Fi Alliance certification lands, which current IEEE projections put at 2028 at the earliest.

Frequently asked questions

Is Wi-Fi 8 faster than Wi-Fi 7? Not by design. Both top out at a theoretical 46 Gbps combined PHY rate, 320 MHz channels and 4096-QAM, per TP-Link's and ASUS's own spec pages. Wi-Fi 8's targets are about latency and reliability, not peak speed.

When does Wi-Fi 8 officially launch? IEEE 802.11 Working Group reports project final approval of 802.11bn in March 2028, with full standards-body ratification around May 2028. Wi-Fi Alliance certification typically follows a finished IEEE amendment.

Can I buy a Wi-Fi 8 router today? Yes, but it's built on a draft spec. ASUS's GT-BN98 and TP-Link's Archer 8 Ultra are both shipping now, and both vendors label them as pre-standard, with no guarantee of compatibility with the final, ratified 802.11bn.

Will my Wi-Fi 7 router work with Wi-Fi 8 devices? Yes. The IEEE 802.11bn amendment is required to remain backward compatible with 2.4, 5 and 6 GHz legacy devices, so Wi-Fi 8 clients will connect to Wi-Fi 7 (and older) access points at Wi-Fi 7 speeds and behavior.

What is MLO and does Wi-Fi 8 change it? Multi-Link Operation lets one device use multiple bands simultaneously; it's a Wi-Fi 7 feature that carries over into Wi-Fi 8 largely unchanged. Wi-Fi 8 adds a separate layer on top: coordination between multiple access points, not just multiple links on one device.

Written byMara Lindqvist

Mara Lindqvist edits the hardware desk. She covers graphics cards, processors, memory and storage, the foundries and chip designers behind them, and what the numbers on a spec sheet mean for people choosing a PC. Specifications in her stories come from manufacturer spec pages and datasheets.

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