TP-Link needs few presentations to sell its routers: it is one of the largest manufacturers in the world and also one of the best known. Well, the Chinese brand has just announce that its new Archer 8 router will be launched in October this year with the next generation of Wi-Fi, the Wi-Fi 8 (802.11bn).
That it arrives with the latest technology is very good, the point is that Wi-Fi as an official standard does not yet exist: at the very least will be ready at the beginning of 2028. TP-Link seems to be clear that whoever hits first, hits twice, but getting so far ahead has fine print.
TP-Link lives in the future. In reality, the TP-Link Archer 8 will be the first of a batch of routers with Wi-Fi 8 that the company plans to deploy in the coming months: mesh systems, travel routers and adapters, all of them with this future connectivity standard and all scheduled throughout 2027, that is, before the official deployment of Wi-Fi 8.
Bottom line: The Archer 8 will hit the market about a year and a half before a complete, certified standard exists. The explanation that gives its president is that “innovation in Wi-Fi has been measured by maximum theoretical speeds (…). But what really matters to users is consistency. Archer 8 is designed to offer precisely that: lower latency, better performance against interference and more stable connectivity in real environments” and well, yes but no.
Why is it important. As usual as we see new standards, Wi-Fi 8 will offer more speed. However, its great novelty is that the nodes of a network can coordinate with each other to better manage the signal, the multi-AP. In practice, it makes the nodes of a mesh network cooperate to reduce interference in the network so that there are fewer outages when you have many devices connected (or your neighbor does). Internal company tests show improvements of up to 33% in performance and better sensitivity in the 5 and 6 GHz bands. Of course, these are data from the manufacturer itself in the laboratory, that is, from the interested party.
The problem is that buying hardware based on an unfinished standard usually ends badly, you just have to look back. With 802.11g, the IEEE’s own files documented incompatibilities between pre-standard routers from different manufacturers because each one implemented a different draft. With Wi-Fi 6E, several models presented at CES 2022 They arrived on the market without Wi-Fi Alliance certification and without having passed interoperability tests. With Wi-Fi 8 there is even more room for disaster: if the draft changes before 2028, flagship features such as multi-AP may not be compatible with devices from other manufacturers.
Context. We are talking about Wi-Fi 8 when Wi-Fi 7 is not even close to being universal and for example, a button: although it is true that the MacBook Pro M5 Pro They are compatible with Wi-Fi 7, the popular MacBook Neo presented by Apple just a couple of months ago, it arrived with Wi-Fi 6. The same with the advanced Apple Vision Pro with M5.
The reality of wireless standards adoption is that it is painfully slow. Furthermore, although the claim of offering Wi-Fi 8 is attractive, if you have a mobile phone or tablet with Wi-Fi 5 and you connect them to a router with Wi-Fi 8 it will not work a miracle: they will connect using only the older protocol. Your joy in a well.
Yes, but. Since the Wi-Fi 8 standard won’t be ready until 2028, it’s almost certain that the Archer 8 won’t have all the features of the final standard implemented when it’s available in stores. What does this mean? That whoever buys it in October 2026 will pay for an incomplete product that could be improved by software in the future… or not. And even if it arrived with the complete standard (this is not the case), it will take years for there to be devices with which to take advantage of it.
But there is another serious problem for TP-Link: The United States banned the import of routers from outside its borders facing potential use for espionage. If the FCC does not approve the product, the Archer 8 will not be sold in the US. In Europe there is no veto, but with Wi-Fi 7 it’s already blocked half of the 6 GHz band by regulation and with Wi-Fi 8 the same is likely to happen.
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Cover | TP-Link and Gemini
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