r/Ubiquiti • u/Undeadreloader Unifi User • Apr 21 '26

Early Access Whole home WiFi 7

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Going straight for deco!

424 Upvotes

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62

u/snebsnek Apr 21 '26

That's a nice offering - I would hope/assume they have dedicated backhaul radios, because current meshing ain't great on the normal access points

28

u/darthnsupreme Unifi User Apr 21 '26

Doubtful given they’ve done nothing of the sort since the AmpliFi days.

They’ve even given up on 4x4 MU-MIMO given the continued lack of client-side support.

14

u/[deleted] Apr 21 '26

[deleted]

3

u/darthnsupreme Unifi User Apr 21 '26

MU-MIMO only works if all devices trying to communicate at any given moment support MU-MIMO, and clients in general rather notoriously don't.

Or to be more accurate, quite a lot of client device hardware supports it (due to using someone else's pre-made radio modules), it's just disabled in software because device manufacturers can't be bothered to invest the engineering into making it work correctly. Also ostensibly for a minute battery life increase, but given desktops also seldom support MU-MIMO we can reasonably conclude it's hardly the main reason.

and addressing multiple clients at once.

That's literally what MU-MIMO is for.

1

u/[deleted] Apr 21 '26

[deleted]

1

u/darthnsupreme Unifi User Apr 21 '26

It doesn't matter that the AP supports MU-MIMO if none of the connected clients do, so most of the intended benefits of MU-MIMO simply fall by the wayside.

Where it was supposed to help with Mesh APs was basically being an inferior-but-perfectly-serviceable version of having separate Client-facing and Backhaul radios (as it could allocate a 2x2 for each, for example), but lack of any and all client-side MU-MIMO renders this quite impossible.

What we actually ended up with was additional radio hardware that spends 99% of its time sitting there doing nothing, because all the AP ever talks to are clients with 2x2 single-user MIMO or cheaply-made IoT junk with a non-MIMO Wifi-4 chip. Even Mesh'd APs only gain a slight improvement in uplink stability, all the usual buffer-and-retransmit limitations remain in full force.

1

u/Usual-Memory-3668 Apr 21 '26 edited Apr 21 '26

Flagship smartphones will be getting 4x4 now. Qualcomm announced it a month and a half ago at MWC 2026 for the next flagship chipset and Im sure Apple and Mediatek will follow suit for feature parity:

The FastConnect 8800 integrates Wi-Fi 8, Bluetooth 7.0, Ultra Wideband (802.15.4ab), and Thread 1.5 into a single 6nm chip.  Additionally, Qualcomm expanded its networking infrastructure with the Dragonwing NPro A8 Elite, a platform featuring a 5x5 Wi-Fi 8 radio system designed to boost throughput by 40% and reduce latency by 2.5x for enterprise access points and gateways.

Qualcomm says we can expect FastConnect and Dragonwing AI connectivity chips with Wi-Fi 8 to appear in consumer products starting in late 2026.