In this episode of the FiveNine Podcast, MediaTek’s James Chen offers an exclusive look at Wi-Fi 8, a pivotal step in wireless evolution. Unlike previous generations, Wi-Fi 8 isn’t about faster speeds—it’s about smarter, more reliable connectivity. Chen breaks down three core innovations: improved uplink range for better device-to-network communication, enhanced network efficiency via dual wide-channel access, and enterprise-grade features that allow devices to receive data from multiple access points simultaneously. Together, these upgrades enable seamless roaming and stronger performance, especially in homes and offices filled with bandwidth-hungry devices.
Chen also delves into how MediaTek is integrating AI across three levels—traditional, generative, and agentic—to further elevate the Wi-Fi experience. From optimizing traffic flow to embedding small language models directly into home gateways, AI can now troubleshoot, diagnose, and improve your network in real time. He teases MediaTek’s upcoming demo at Network X in Paris, where these AI-powered solutions will be shown in action. Whether you're a service provider or just someone who wants smoother streaming at home, this conversation provides a clear and engaging roadmap for what’s next in connectivity.
Alejandro Piñero:
You are listening to a sponsored episode of the FiveNine.
All right, welcome everyone. You're joining in for another episode here of the FiveNine Podcast, brought to you by Pierce Network. I'm your host this week, Alejandro Piñero, and I'm very excited to be on your feed once again. And this week I'm joined by James Chen, Vice President Product Technology Marketing at Media Tech. James, thanks for joining us and coming on the podcast to talk to us today.
James Chen:
No, it's great and thank you for having me, Alejandro. Great to be here.
Alejandro Piñero:
Awesome. So I'm very excited to hear all about WiFi evolution and what it actually means. But before we get more into the weeds of the topic here, James, I thought it might be a good idea to start at the top and give everyone the same base layer of a definition almost of once we think about WiFi 8, what are some of those key new features that we should be looking out for specifically?
James Chen:
Oh no, that's a great question, Alejandro, and one that we get quite often. I would start by saying that WiFi 8 is focused on making WiFi what we call ultra-reliable. Because for the first time there are no increase in maximum speed as we move from WiFi 7 to WiFi 8. So instead we, the greater community, focus on making features to make this connection more reliable in three ways. One is improving the uplink range. So because there's a lot of traffic these days that goes from your phone or your laptop or your client device to your home gateway or the access point that's in your enterprise, right? So that's the uplink traffic, got to make that range better to improve the user experience. And number two is we this something called increasing the network efficiency. And what that means is for the first time you can have two very wide channel, which is high speed clients talking to the same access point or home gateway at the same time, just offset by a small frequency difference.
And then number three is WiFi 8 includes a lot of enterprise class features. For the first time, WiFi 8 is going to take a page of cellular technology where the client is not simply just receiving data from one access point, but it could be multiple access points, for example, two access points. This could be, for example, your main gateway in your house that you get your internet connection from and another access point which is like your repeater or extender in your home. So both of these two devices are bringing data to your client at the same time. And what that allows is better roaming as you walk about in your house, for example.
Alejandro Piñero:
Sure. And James, you've already hinted at some of this here, but I did want to hear specifically on what the benefits of WiFi 8 are. If you were to put it in a quick soundbite or in a digestible form for our listeners, what would you highlight from those benefits?
James Chen:
Yeah, if I got in the elevator and had to do a 20 second elevator pitch. So I would say, hey, unlike previous WiFi generations, WiFi 8 is not about making an engine that has more horsepower, but it's rather about how do we put that existing power that we already have, that speed that we already defined and translate that into the ground more efficiently. So how do you put the power down more efficiently so that's more usable? I think that would be probably a more apt soundbite to have.
Alejandro Piñero:
Excellent. And James, of course, it wouldn't be a telecom, much less a tech podcast if I didn't bring up AI. So let me put it in the context here of WiFi. Has AI been part of this evolution and how does it fit into how we think about and develop WiFi going forward?
James Chen:
Yeah, absolutely. We get a lot of requests for AI, as you can imagine just about every day. AI is not part of the WiFi age standard. The standard deals more communications-based technology. Nonetheless, at MediaTek we believe AI is absolutely very important for the future of as well as other comms that we do like 5G or gigabit fiber or above. And so at MediaTek we kind of have this framework in thinking about AI, kind of just to cut through all the clutter so to speak. So our framework, what we call is we have a three level framework for AI. And the purpose is that each level goes increasingly from analytic or what we call traditional AI to genitive AI, to all the buzzes on agentic AI. And as you migrate from up to these levels, the benefits to the end subscriber or the end consumer increases.
Just to give you a short brief on this, level one is like I said, what we call traditional AI. So it's non-transform based, and there's a lot of things that we can do using this good old-fashioned AI technology. I feel funny saying that, but good old-fashioned AI technology to kind of predict, for example, what the traffic types you have amongst all your applications in the home. And why would you want to do that? Well, you want to kind of predict this so that you can tweak WiFi related parameters for transmit and receive so that you can optimize the network for better quality of service. And then as you migrate up to level two, this is where genitive AI comes in. All the buzz about small language models being small enough so that you can run inside an edge device like your home gateway. And that's what we're talking about and a lot of applications here.
The predominant one is how can small language models take your input as a natural language, like a chat on a prompt and help you do things such as change something, troubleshoot your network or summarize issues of what's going on in your network. And the third thing is agentic AI, right? This is workflow-based AI and here is your, again, like generative AI, you're running small language models, but you're completing a task, a workflow. So it take commands from a non-technical user like my mom and dad, they're 81, they don't understand anything about WiFi, but the idea is they can chat the issue to a chatbot that's running inside the gateway that's running agentic AI and they will magically understand the context and go away, think about the problem and come back after a certain amount of time, not too long hopefully, and kind of hopefully respond to them.
And then along the way, either soothe their fears about their WiFi not being fast enough or do something in the background to fix it. So that's the three levels. On all three levels really the benefit is helping the service providers or enterprise customers or just companies in general reduce costs because now you're talking to a virtual agent inside your home gateway.
Alejandro Piñero:
And James, I appreciate you talking about this at an industry level. Of course this is an effort across the ecosystem to put this all together and really utilize the power of AI and connectivity to improve WiFi experience. But let's speak here specifically about MediaTek before we close the interview. How are you guys thinking about this WiFi evolution and specifically about AI as you look ahead?
James Chen:
Yeah, specifically to AI, and again, I'm going to use the car analogy. So all this stuff is great when I talk about these three levels of AI and this fancy framework, but what does all mean? I guess that's your question. N MediaTek, we're implementing these three levels of AI either by ourselves or in conjunction with certain industry partners and leaders. And I'll do you one better for the first time we're going to announce this and it's going to be on your show, Alejandro, is that we're going to announce that people can stop by Network X. Network X is a show about broadband technology specifically. And I think this year it happens on October 14th in Paris. And so we'll be demonstrating, showing people if you come by to our booth or our partner's booth, these three levels of AI in action and they can also talk about WiFi 8 as well. So hopefully that answers your question.
Alejandro Piñero:
Absolutely, James, and I appreciate you bringing that scoop here today for our listeners, I know that a lot of them of course, will be at Network X to see in action and in person what we've been talking about here, but hopefully of course, for those folks not going, they can also reach out to you in the MediaTek team to find out more. But in the meantime, James, Tim, vice president, product technology marketing at MediaTek, thank you so much again for coming here, talking to us about these industry trends and putting it into perspective. I certainly learned a lot today.
James Chen:
No, thank you. Thank you, Alejandro, and the staff at FiveNine Podcasts. Great to be here. Hopefully I can come back in the future and give you guys an update as well.
Alejandro Piñero:
Absolutely. We'll be honored, James. And finally, thanks to you, our listener, for joining us once again here with another leading industry voice telling us about what to look out for and look forward to in our telecoms world. And a special thank you, of course, to MediaTek for sponsoring this episode. We look forward to being in your feed again soon. Until then, take care and speak soon. Bye-bye.
Thanks for listening to the FiveNine. You can find out more about this topic in our show notes, and you can find all our podcast episodes at fierce-network.com/keyword/podcast. Catch you next time.