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2025 Wi-Fi Trends to Keep an Eye On

Explore the transformative potential of Wi-Fi 7, enhanced location services and AI-driven cloud solutions in 2025. Discover how these advancements promise unprecedented performance, security and efficiency, while addressing infrastructure challenges and optimizing business operations. Stay ahead with insights on new technologies and strategic adoption for a future-ready network.

In this blog

  1. Wi-Fi 7
  2. Reignition of location services conversations
  3. Cloud and AI everywhere
  4. Highlighting other areas of infrastructure deficiencies
  5. Conclusion

Wi-Fi is well known for being an industry moving at breakneck speeds. This is our 2025 roundup of Wi-Fi-specific topics that we think you should keep an eye on!

 Wi-Fi 7

With every major vendor having Wi-Fi 7 platforms announced and shipping, it should be no surprise that the leading conversation for everyone will be Wi-Fi 7. Promising gigabits upon gigabits of performance, ultra-responsive latency, better security (WPA3), and new spectrum (6GHz), there is a lot to unpack just on this topic alone. Vendors will differentiate by way of uplinks (number and speed), spatial streams and radio counts which are likely to include:

  • Client serving Wi-Fi Radios
  • Scanning radios for security and analytics
  • Non-Wi-Fi Radios such as BLE, Zigbee, etc

While the speeds and feeds are likely to start the conversation for you, expect to tackle management platforms, AI adoption, licensing changes and new use cases to justify the ROI for our new networks.

 Reignition of location services conversations

Your business is more than your users. We all produce, engage, occupy, and/or manufacture something, and our impact on these areas is something that traditional IT doesn't bother with. This year will see a reinvigoration of Line of Business conversations, facilities conversations, occupancy and space optimization conversations. New AP platforms are going to enable these discussions by way of integrating other wireless solutions to bring new solutions to bear. With ever-improving ROI, more standard components, and resolution options to meet almost any need, this will be a huge opportunity to optimize our business's locations, doing more with less. Watch out for location components in the form of hardware:

  • Ultra-Wide Band (UWB)
  • High Accuracy Distance Measurement (HADM)
  • Zigbee (and other 802.15.4 technologies)

In addition, software components are expected to be heavily driven by AI features and delivered in a cloud-first manner.

 Cloud and AI everywhere

Cloud will be a part of your infrastructure if it's not already. Cloud will be delivering your AI and ML driven functionality on top of your normally consumed management platform and licensing functionality. As all infrastructure providers extend management and networking functionality with AI, so comes the adoption of the platforms that can scale at the pace of AI - without you needing to. The Cloud has been adopted in all manner of organizations, from the federal government to banking and all verticals in between – while AI has proven itself in Assurance and troubleshooting solutions. The Cloud and AI are here to stay, and ensuring that you're on track with other cloud-driven services (Email, O365, DNS, commerce, B2B, etc) could set the precedence with your organization to embrace more business-impacting solutions.

 Highlighting other areas of infrastructure deficiencies

It was only a few years back that Wi-Fi could theoretically go beyond the 1G uplink boundary. With the improvements in 6GHz (Wi-Fi 6E) and now Wi-Fi 7, that bottleneck has moved from an enterprise corner case to a very real possibility with everyday consumer devices. This is going to shine a very big light on areas of the network that aren't up to being able to deliver these benefits. Ensure that your 2025 conversations around Wi-Fi include a long hard look at these other components in your infrastructure:

  • Core/Access/Distribution link speeds and overall design
  • SD-WAN and overall Circuit bandwidth
  • Security and firewall performance and disposition

Power Over Ethernet (POE)

  • POE Budgeting is going to be your traditional "total envelope" power budget that is what you'd normally calculate. Wi-Fi 7 APs, and especially gear with extra radios or USB modules, will absolutely require more operating power than even last generations Access Points. Ensuring that you have enough watts available in your switch is only the first, albeit still a very important task.
  • POE Capabilities is the ability for your switch to deliver greater power to your APs, as needed. With some APs taking nearly 50 watts each, the new POE delivery standard 802.3bt is considered a requirement for most all Wi-Fi 7 adoption
  • POE Redundancy is delivering multiple POE feeds from different switches to ensure uptime in the event of a switch failure.

Restrictive solution adoption strategies

All vendors are building solutions that work "better together". You should be cautious about ensuring that there aren't any other dependencies or improvements to your solutions in a full-stack (single vendor) deployment. Vendors often aim to steer customers into proprietary pricing structures or hardware ecosystems, limiting flexibility and making it challenging for some customers to adapt or switch solutions.

 Conclusion

No matter where you're at in your Wi-Fi journey, from casual hotspot coverage to low latency, high-density enterprise – WWT can help you navigate the technology you need to make your use cases successful. For a deeper dive into these topics, engage your WWT Account Manager, explore these ATC topics or review these additional blogs on wwt.com:

 

Wi-Fi 7 blog

WPA3 blog