Why Wi-Fi 8 Multi-AP Coordination, Wi‑Fi 7 Rollouts And Open RAN Moves Signal A Faster, Smarter Network Future

Headlines hit hard this week, and we stitched them into a practical roadmap you can use. We start with the fresh demos pointing toward Wi‑Fi 8’s multi‑AP future—coordinated radios, smarter spectral reuse, and AI‑assisted congestion control aimed squarely at dense campuses where roaming and contention burn time and budget. Some features may stay aspirational, but the signal is clear: access points are learning to cooperate, not compete.

From there we ground the hype in what’s shipping. Rogers lit up Wi‑Fi 7 gear in Quebec with TP‑Link and Cisco hardware, Aruba pushed MLO improvements for cleaner onboarding across 2.4, 5, and 6 GHz, and forecasts suggest a meaningful slice of new APs will be Wi‑Fi 7 capable by year’s end. On the carrier side, an MVNO pact opens dual‑SIM handsets and smarter Wi‑Fi‑cellular handoffs for business users. The dream of a seamless hybrid fabric still trips on handoff quirks, but the ecosystem is finally lining up—hardware, firmware, and deployment playbooks.

We also zoom out to the RAN. Deutsche Telekom’s partnership with Rakuten to orchestrate tens of thousands of sites signals that multi‑vendor Open RAN is ready for prime time. Faster provisioning, easier failover, and the freedom to mix Nokia, Ericsson, and Samsung radios—with a Cisco security overlay—give operators levers they’ve wanted for years. At the edge of the home and office, Matter certifications for Nest, Echo, and Eve plus multiprotocol hubs from TP‑Link and Linksys shorten onboarding and normalize WPA3 and segmentation, which is good news for MSPs, MDUs, and smart‑building teams.

Security headlines keep us honest. A fresh warning on evil twin attacks meets urgent firmware from Cisco and Fortinet that adds anomaly detection and automated quarantine. We translate that into action: zero trust on guest networks, continuous AI‑driven threat modeling, and verified patch windows. After a week of DNS and cloud wobbles—yes, everyone still blames “the Wi‑Fi”—we stress tested cellular failover and reviewed playbooks that keep users working and ops sane.

Listen for the quick takeaways, keep what helps, and share what you’re seeing in the field. If this briefing sharpened your planning, follow the show, drop a review, and pass it to a teammate who needs the TL;DR before their next strategy meeting.

Chapters

• 1:00 Format Shift And Weekly Scope
• 1:25 Wi‑Fi 8 Demos And Multi‑AP Coordination
• 2:51 Wi‑Fi 7 Rollouts And Adoption
• 3:31 Carrier Moves And MVNO Strategy
• 4:23 Open RAN Orchestration At Scale
• 5:04 Matter Devices And Smart Home Onboarding
• 5:52 Security Alerts And Zero Trust Priorities
• 6:30 Outages, Failover, And Community Ask
• 6:51 Events Roundup And Closing

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:30

Hey everybody, what's up? It's Drew Lentz, the Wireless Nerd, and you're listening to the Waves podcast. This week we're going to do something a little bit different. I've scraped some of the headlines, I've seen what's going on. I know there's so much news that I want to try a little bit of a different format. I want to see if I can go through some of the headlines and then have maybe a feature episode or talk a little bit more about some of the things that are impacting our industry. So first, let's go through what's new, what's now, what's next. This is for the week of November 1st through November 7th, 2025. There's a lot of stuff going on with Wi-Fi 8, and you know, nothing real, I don't feel like has been announced yet, but over the last week, Qualcomm and Broadcom and Intel have done a lot more acceleration on their work with Wi-Fi 8 test silicone. They've got new partnerships that were revealed. There's been some industry sessions that are going on, and it includes collaborative efforts on multi-AP coordination. Now that's one of the big deals with Wi-Fi 8 where all the APs are supposed to talk together. And there was even speculation that like you could even do MIMO chains where if your client is connecting at 2.4 on access point A on one MIMO chain, but it's receiving data from access point B on another MIMO chain, and they're supposed to work together. I don't know. There's a lot going on with this and specifically with Wi-Fi 8. But what Qualcomm, Broadcom, and Intel showed this week was some actual AP coordinate, multi-AP coordination, and that was with Qualcomm's reference design, and it was targeting specifically dense campus environments. And Broadcom demoed adaptive RF at the IEEE interim. And so adaptive RF, there's a lot of features that are coming out on Wi-Fi 8. Some of them seem like they might not ever work, but some of them actually seem pretty cool. Anyway, these developments align with IEEE 80211BN and their proposed standards featuring spectral reuse, real-time device steering, and the new AI-powered congestion mitigation. Lots of crazy buzzwords going on in there. Anyway, industry consensus is moving towards deployment trials in quarter two of 2026. Now to talk back about Wi-Fi 7. On November 3rd, Rogers in Canada publicly launched the deployment of TP Link and Cisco Wi-Fi 7 routers for the Quebec market with the Archer BE 800 and the Cisco Catalyst 9166 showing live speed test results in homes and co-working spaces. Aruba, you know, HPE announced a firmware update for its AP635 with enhancements for multi-link operation allowing simultaneous triband connectivity, so 245 and 6 gig for enterprise onboarding. Forecasts from Light Reading indicate up to 15% of AP shipments in North America will be Wi-Fi 7 capable by December, with increased adoption in you guessed it, retail and education verticals. Altice USA filed its quarter three report on November 4th, showing a 67,000 decrease in broadband customers. This, they say, is attributed to competitive rollouts from T-Mobile's home internet with Nokia Fastmile Gateway and Comcast Xfinity and Mobile's bundling. Now on November 5th, Charter announced a strategic MVNO partnership with Verizon, opening dual sim Wi-Fi 7 handsets like the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra and the iPhone 16 Pro for enterprise and small business clients. This move allows dynamic switchover and improved handoff between cellular and Wi-Fi. And this is relevant for hybrid networks and remote site deployments. Have I seen it working? No, it doesn't ever work the way that it's supposed to. So let's hope that uh that there's some light at the end of the tunnel when it comes to handoff between Wi-Fi 7, which has plagued the iPhone 17. Let's see if there's some help there that comes along. Now, big news from the open RAN world, Deutsche Telekom and Rocketan have confirmed at the 5G RAN Europe event on November 2nd, the Rocketan Symphony will provide orchestration tools for its Open RAN project, covering 30,000 radio sites across Germany and Eastern Europe. This enables mixing Nokia, Ericsson, and Samsung hardware with Cisco coming in with a security overlay and analytics. Now, this is really cool because you've got multiple manufacturers all using the same RAN or operating on the same RAN. And initial integration reports showed up to 30% faster provisioning compared to a single vendor system. And this is critical for rapid scale and failover management. So open RAN really taken off. Some good numbers posted up there. On November 4th, the Wi-Fi Alliance certified new matter-ready devices from Google Nest, Amazon Echo, and Eve Systems, highlighting bulk onboarding, network segmentation, and native WPA3 support. TP Link and Links has confirmed fast track launches in both North America and the EU, but you got to be careful because all the stuff that's happening with TP Link in North America, we don't even know if they're going to be available in the United States here before too long. But they'll be offering hubs and APs with multi-protocol support, reducing their setup times by half. Now, this is really cool, especially when you look at what's happening with Matter and IKEA in the news today. IKEA announced a whole line of Matter products that they're bringing out there to help drive your smart home. Deployment guides released this week will detail automated provisioning for MSPs and MDU operators from those vendors. Google issued an updated warning on November 5th regarding upticks and evil twin attacks on public Wi-Fi. Cisco and Fortinet push critical firmware updates for their catalyst and Ford AP series. So if you've got those products, make sure you check and see if there's a software update available. And they add anomaly detection and automated quarantine protocols. Enterprises responding to this should prioritize zero trust cap and continuous AI threat modeling and standard operating procedure in public and guest networks. Now, there's been some issues going on with the cloud lately and lots of DNS things happening, but there was a downtime incident that led to a tongue-in-cheek internal post encouraging teams to quote file paper tickets while the Wi-Fi recovers. This episode prompted a quick review of cellular failover and highlighted the value of robust backup planning and maybe a little bit of levity in the knock. So what did you do to make up for the downtime? I know there was a lot of stuff that was happening between a number of different carriers over the last couple of weeks. And even though it wasn't the Wi-Fi, everyone was complaining that the Wi-Fi was down. Was there anything fun that you did? Drop a note in the comments. Couple of events coming up, the IEEE 80211 working group in Bangkok, November 9th through 14th. WLPC Express Dubai, November 17th and 18th. WLPC Phoenix, February 18th through 20th. AWS reInvent is coming up here the first week of December. Then we've got CES coming up as fall as well as NRF following CES. So that's the briefing for this week. Hopefully uh gives you something to think about and chew on, especially if you're working for deployment and strategy meetings. Thanks for tuning into the Waves podcast for what's new, what's now, and what's next in Wi-Fi. Stay informed. See you next week.