This article was written by Tuncay Cil, Founding Partner of Bronze Moon Accelerator. 
With the holiday season upon us, it’s a natural time to reflect on the year and take stock of the forces that shape our world. Having spent most of my career and built most of my friendships within the Wi-Fi tech community, obviously, one of the most significant developments has been Wi-Fi.
Wi-Fi has evolved from a college experiment into a critical infrastructure that powers modern life. Once a niche technology, it now enables freedom, connectivity, and innovation in our modern society. Wi-Fi supports everything from smart home devices to remote work, education, and communication. For users, it offers unprecedented convenience, such as seamless roaming between locations, wire-free devices, anytime, anywhere. However, alongside these benefits, persistent challenges remain, including inconsistent reliability and QoE, interoperability issues, and high costs of support. Despite these drawbacks, Wi-Fi has become foundational to our daily activities, driving productivity and inclusivity. Yet, addressing these ongoing concerns is essential to unlock its full potential and ensure Wi-Fi’s continued relevance in the future.
Understanding the evolution of Wi-Fi
Two concepts become useful in making sense of how Wi-Fi has evolved in the real world: network economics and contention-based networks. Network economics suggests that as more devices, applications, and services are added to a network, its overall value increases. However, the challenge arises when multiple connections compete for limited resources, such as spectrum, for the sole benefit of individual connectivity goal. Multiply this with multitude of devices in a given home, many apartments in a building, and wide variety of applications, this “contention”, goes unmanaged, hampers the ability to provide consistent, reliable, and ubiquitous Wi-Fi, and certainly drive up operational costs of networks and services as the demand for connectivity grows.
A possible cure: Better ecosystem collaboration beyond industry standards
The growth of computing resources on devices and routers has opened new possibilities for improving network reliability. Enhanced observability at the end-user device level, dynamic adjustments of network parameters based on real-time demands, and the ability to federate access, security, and configuration across self-managed network segments are all potential solutions for more cost-effective, residential-grade Wi-Fi networks. Some industry leaders are already collaborating beyond standard protocols to streamline interoperability and reduce friction between networks.
Reliability also hinges on how new and legacy devices interact with existing networks. This goes beyond standards compliance, involving real-world testing and debugging efforts across various service providers. Recent collaborations between major manufacturers in the U.S. to address real-world issues such as video streaming performance are a step toward improving the user experience and reducing operational costs for vendors. These industry efforts are critical in shaping the future of Wi-Fi as a reliable, efficient infrastructure.
WBA working groups led by key stakeholders of Wi-Fi industry on Wi-Fi 7 and Wi-Fi 8, 5G, AFC, OpenRoaming, Testing & Interoperability, and IoT have provided much needed industry collaboration overlay across IEEE, Wi-Fi Alliance and other industry standards organizations. In the following posts, we will provide some thoughts and real-world impact of some of this emerging collaborative data-driven and observable future of Wi-Fi.
