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Wi-Fi 8 is the first wireless upgrade in years that isn't chasing speed
- LogTrim 2mo agoThe peak-speed arms race stopped being interesting to me a while ago. I don't need 20+ Gbit/s theoretical Wi-Fi. I need the connection to stay boring when I'm at the edge of coverage or the neighbours are hammering the same spectrum. The 95th-percentile latency and packet-loss targets here seem much more meaningful than another 2x headline speed increase. My only scepticism is how much of this survives real consumer hardware. Wi-Fi 6 had things like OFDMA that sounded great on paper, but support/implementation was pretty uneven.
- itopaloglu83 2mo agoMy neighbor thinks that they can increase their 100Mbps ISP speed by having 5 or 6 access points at 2.4GHz in their 1400sq ft (~140m2) apartment. There’s so much interference that the package dropout rate is around 40% at 2.4GHz usually.
- Gigachad 2mo ago2.4ghz is pretty bad but the 5 and 6ghz bands don’t really travel far. I’m in a dense area and 5ghz works great while 6 has basically no detectable traffic.
- spockz 2mo agoHaving a AP in every room can be as significant boost if the walls impede the signal a lot. In fact we have one wall which is especially bad. Stand in front of it or next to it and reception from the front of the house is decent. Take one step back behind the wall and signal drops to less than 10%. So having the 5-6 AP is not the problem, then shouting at max power is the problem. Especially “gaming” routers tend to do this.
- WhyNotHugo 2mo agoAgree completely. Higher speeds are a bit pointless for most users. Unless you have an extremely fast NAS, where you need to copy (not stream) data over Wi-Fi, you're unlikely to be anywhere near the current limits. I'm using 802.11ac and see no need for higher speeds.
- mschuster91 2mo ago> Higher speeds are a bit pointless for most users. Higher speeds automatically means less latency and that does matter, especially if you are into stuff like games where every millisecond matters.
- Hendrikto 2mo agoI think the point is that these numbers are theoretical, and only reachable in a lab. So in practice you do not really benefit.
- izacus 2mo agoThat's not really how latency works though.
- PunchyHamster 2mo agoold wifi already have sub 1ms latency, it doesn't matter to be any faster than that
- LoganDark 2mo agoMakes sense since a lot of networks don't have access to speed. The highest speeds in my area are around 150MBps, so 5-6GBps or whatever is a perfectly fine upper bound for me. Range and congestion however has been an issue.
- trvz 2mo agoYou used the wrong units there. Should be Mbps and Gbps.
- LoganDark 2mo agoI did not use the wrong units, I converted them. The speeds available in my area currently max out at 1.2Gbps which is 150MBps.
- gib444 2mo agoThe widely-accepted convention is to use bits when discussing line speeds (as the article does).
- riobard 2mo agoWhen talking about network bandwidth, it is custom to measure in bit-per-second therefore the "bps" notation. If you convert to bytes, it is highly recommended to use "b/s" notation instead, i.e 150MB/s, to avoid confusion.
- LoganDark 2mo agoThanks, I'll make sure to use B/s in the future.
- tveyben 2mo agoBut IIRC the de facto unit for network transmission speeds are bits - not bytes - pr second, and when it’s more the rule than the exception than people write ‘B’ in stead of ‘b’ then the confusion gets even higher.. I would expect this crowd here to not make these mistakes as ofte. :-) B is defacto for storage…
- Reason077 2mo agoOh no. I haven't even upgraded to WiFi 7 yet!
- LoganDark 2mo agoI have a Wi-Fi 7 AP and this confused some members of my family that didn't even know it went higher than 6. I thought it was pretty funny
- avhception 2mo agoMy family doesn't know that the WiFi AP is not the DECT base. They understand when I tell them, but that's gone after a week. They use the words WiFi (or, as we say in Germany, WLAN) and "Internet" almost interchangeably. At work, too. "Internet kaputt" can mean anything from "my device is broken" to "our ERP app is not doing the right thing / responding too slow".
- warpech 2mo agoThat is true everywhere. I think operating systems could do a better job at informing about the health of the internet connection in words the user understands. What seems to be the current bottleneck: Your router does not respond. Turn it off and on. This comes close: https://www.getapp.com/all-software/a/breakdown/ https://www.getapp.com/all-software/a/breakdown/
- MrGilbert 2mo agoYou can’t blame them, though. I live in the industry for over 25 years now, and when 5 Ghz wifi got introduced, and started to live alongside 2.4 Ghz with all the different protocols, I was like: "Nah. Screw it." I honestly have no idea what the current hot stuff in terms of wifi is.^^
- avhception 2mo agoYeah, I guess I draw the line at the workplace. Some of these "Internet kaputt" cases turned out to be a rejected login to our bespoke ERP website.
- swiftcoder 2mo agoMakes sense. Last router upgrade I reached the point where my wifi speeds (at least near the router) were indistinguishable from plugging into gigabit ethernet - that's fast enough for any home task, and the same speed as my fibre uplink. I can't see chasing speed further, outside of very specialised setups.
- riobard 2mo ago> with Wi-Fi 7 reaching a maximum theoretical throughput of 23Gbit per band Note to tech reports: do not EVER quote this metric as it is the most useless piece of information.
- PhilipRoman 2mo ago"per band" is also hilarious, as if you could get that kind of data rate in 2.4GHz
- riobard 2mo agoIt's slightly better than the aggregate number :p
- avhception 2mo agoWe need reliable, real-world ~20mbit/s for our warehouse scanners, not 382722 theoretical Gbit/s 5cm from the access point. And roaming that works instead of stupid clients clinging to somewhere or being thrown into a reconnect loop when the AP tries to get them to roam. I know this is theoretically possible today. But in the real world, I have inherited the setup, so AP locations are fixed for now, clients are some random old handhold motorola android devices and interference is high. In comparison, DECT has been flawless in the same space. Set and forget, just works. I always wondered if we could have a kind of DECT proxy on the LAN, and have the ERP application talk to that proxy using DECT... I mean, it's a few EANs and stuff, DECT could handle this easily.
- jauntywundrkind 2mo agoDECT or DECT-NR+? I do kind of want to play with this.
- BlackRabbit1 2mo agoAny DECT (NR) stuff is super expensive if you build embedded software/hardware for it. It's basically Nordic-only.
- dmos62 2mo agoSounds like your old, random clients might be a problem?
- avhception 2mo agoOne of many, yes!
- abhinavk 2mo agoEnsure your network has no <WiFi6 devices.
- afavour 2mo agoEasier said than done when you’re dealing with warehouse equipment.
- blfr 2mo agoIt's the first because we finally caught up on speed. We have it better than I imagined possible. Last year, I saw 1600 Mbit/s from the Internet at a normie's place with an ISP-provided router. Still have a cat 6 cable around the living room but haven't used it in the last 2 years. Not exactly wifi but I routinely get 600-800 Mbit on 5g networks in crowded areas.
- JoshTriplett 2mo agoEthernet isn't just about speed, it's about reliability. Before I wired my office, I regularly experienced latency spikes and hangs on video calls. After upgrading, I essentially never do.
- robertlagrant 2mo agoIt's 2026 and I'm running more cat-6 in my home to all my static devices. My theory is using wires lowers wireless contention, leaving more WiFi for the mobile devices.
- indemnity 2mo agoI put in 2 CAT6 wires to every room in the house (4 in my office, 4 in garage), with one big PoE switch in the garage. Everything with an Ethernet port is wired, wifi is for phones and tablets only (a few UniFi WiFi 6 APS). Works great! Internet has never dropped for me while working, family loves the always working NAS streaming via wired Apple TV.
- jiehong 2mo ago> (…) while further increments have been smaller in percentage, speeds have always increased very significantly. Off topic, but that sounds sort of contradictory, or misleading at the very least.
- Leherenn 2mo agoWell, if the first increment is 100%, you only need 50% the next time to get the same absolute increase as the first time. And then 33%, and so on. That's how I read it at least.
- bjackman 2mo agoI recently upgraded from a WiFi 5 router to a WiFi 7 one, and my bandwidth increase was a grand 0% (that's ok though I was actually just sick of my old router's shitty UI!) There is about 10m and a brick wall between my AP and my desk so yeah, a fancy new MCS that can theoretically deliver 25Gbps was just never gonna be useful to me. Also I've worked on (other non-WiFi) 802.11 products where our competitive edge was all about interference motivation. Our competitors at trade shows would see the demos and say "that's fake, you guys are cheating". So I have the feeling that in general there might be alpha in more resilient wireless links.
- eviks 2mo agoHow often do you see your router's UI to justify any change?
- maccard 2mo agoI have a multi AP setup for the same reasons as the parent - large thick internal walls (and a “long” home instead of evenly shaped), and frustratingly more than I want to is the answer…
- bjackman 2mo agoMy router is slightly loadbearing for my homelab so probably much more often than average!
- jofzar 2mo agoI had a TP-Link deco, which while great as mesh, you couldn't limit the speed of certain devices. Which was again fine, except when the PlayStation 5 in a room could literally saturate the whole 250mbs bandwidth of my internet and when it would do an update would make our whole houses internet unusable. It's seriously impressive how it wasnt possible to set per device speed limits or even QoS which has been a thing since like 2007
- wildzzz 2mo agoIs your Deco in AP mode or router mode? Mine says QoS is only available in router mode. I just use my ISP router with the AP turned off and my Decos in AP mode. My ISP router is pretty full-featured so I don't really care to deal with whatever simplified management the Deco would give me if it was the router and firewall instead.
- maxglute 2mo agoTime for new steamlink.
- ksec 2mo agoIn typical WiFi fashion, for all the WIFi 8 features to working perfectly and debugged we have to wait for WiFi 9 [1]. This was true with WiFi 5, WiFi 6 and WiFI 7. Unfortunately IMO WiFi router brand selection is getting increasingly small. I have no issue or problem with using UniFI myself. But it is not something I could recommend to family and friends as they don't know how to set it up. Eero is not available to much of the world outside US. I just wish Apple revive its AirPort Express business. [1] https://www.nokia.com/blog/advancing-connectivity-with-wi-fi-9/ https://www.nokia.com/blog/advancing-connectivity-with-wi-fi...
- smashed 2mo agoWait till you see the number of actual chip vendors. There is about 3.. Broadcom, Qualcomm and MediaTek. Together they control I believe 100% of wifi chips used in routers and APs. Often it's sold as a package / system on chip so it's also the main cpu. On the client side there is a little bit more competition but not much.
- cogman10 2mo agoClient side don't you just add Realtek and Intel? I don't think almost anyone else does wifi chips.
- smashed 2mo agoYup. I might have forgotten Marvell in the list but yes, that is pretty much it. I am also not sure of their exact market shares but I would suspect one or two are probably steering the majority of the "standards". I'd suspect Broadcom and Qualcomm to have the most influence.
- cogman10 2mo agoI believe Intel is also a pretty prominent member in the standards committee. Mostly for historic reasons as I don't think they have too much market share outside of PC/laptop wifi modules. But I agree, Broadcom and Qualcomm are the heavy hitters.
- tetrisgm 2mo agoLess latency is excellent news. This is the main reason why gamers still prefer Ethernet.
- Zambyte 2mo agoConsistent latency is generally more important for gaming than low latency. If I had to pick between a baseline of 8ms but with enough spikes to > 200ms to bring the average to 30ms, or a consistent 90ms with no spikes or dips, I would certainly choose the latter.
- jibal 2mo agoHey, that was a great comment about homoiconicity and {code} in C. It's nuts that it got killed, apparently because you said you used an LLM. HN (among others) is in the grip of hysteria on the issue.
- Zambyte 2mo agoThanks, I did put a decent amount of time into that. I couldn't get any model to one shot a truly homoiconic C, it took some coaxing, even from SOTA models. Maybe I caught a length based flag or something too, since it was fairly long. Oh well, I tried.
- sandworm101 2mo ago>> But with Wi-Fi 7 reaching a maximum theoretical throughput of 23Gbit per band No. Just no. That speed is only possible when standing at a Nevada test range, in late spring, on a ladder, holding the router above your head, with a black cat sitting on your left shoulder. Any minor change from those parameters and your speeds will be 30% the theoretical maximum ... maybe 50% if you can only find a grey cat.
- yxhuvud 2mo agoWith real devices I get something like 1.8GBit/s with less than 2 meters between the stuff. Which is far from maximum but who cares, it is still great.
- Razengan 2mo agoAre we not yet at a point where we could have a truly global network that uses multiple technologies and mediums to keep a user always connected? Like seamlessly switching between Wi-Fi, nG, Bluetooth, satellite, pigeons, cans-and-wire.. and still having a stable global address? (that you could change later of course)
- smashed 2mo agoIt's possible using overlay networks but other than that there has been no progress on that front. The routing table updates would overwhelm the system. Ipv6 does nothing to address device roaming. There is multipath TCP but I have never encountered anything using it. Most improvements on that front has been happening on the application layer, where the app attempts to retain functionality even though the underlying network conditions are changing, to various degrees of success (mostly not that great).
- Razengan 2mo agoThere's a great hyper-sci-fi RPG setting called Numenera, set a billion years in the future, that has this cool little concept of a "datasphere", as in analogous to atmosphere, an omnipresent permanent connectivity network.. Shouldn't that be our end goal with all this tech?
- toast0 2mo ago> There is multipath TCP but I have never encountered anything using it. IIRC siri uses it and iOS (maybe macOS too?) exposes it to app developers.
- ValdikSS 2mo agoGoogle/IETF works on that with QUIC multipath. https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-quic-multipath/ https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-quic-multipath/ > Last updated 2026-08-13
- hnarn 2mo agoSacrificing bandwidth for range and reliability would be a welcome change, but I’ve far passed the point where all news about Wifi just strikes me as marketing bullshit.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- CrzyLngPwd 2mo agoI'd just like something that can manage 250m and a few large oak trees in between.
- lo0dot0 2mo agoA drone carrying a fiber cable across the tree line. Battle tested.
- creatonez 2mo agoDoes the network automatically detect when birds have eaten the fiber cable and send out drones to fight off the birds and lay a new cable?
- quickthrowman 2mo agoPre-terminated direct burial fiber, a trencher, and two media converters.
- 1970-01-01 2mo agoStop chasing everything. Stop and give me true open source repos for the Wi-Fi chips and drivers so the already well-established community can care for my router for the next 20 years. Force this into the spec. https://wireless.docs.kernel.org/en/latest/en/users/drivers.html https://wireless.docs.kernel.org/en/latest/en/users/drivers....
- dingaling 2mo agoUnfortunately ( for the WiFi Alliance ) that doesn't sell new kit.
- BatteryMountain 2mo agoEven Intel is doing a poor job with firmwares. Its been such a pain lately to deal with them (WIFI, LAN, CAMERA). Its no longer just plug and play.
- ckocagil 2mo agoAre you talking about router firmware or NIC drivers? There's a slim chance of vendors opening drivers, but firmware is never going to happen.
- ValdikSS 2mo agoThere's only 1 (one) all-open chip I know of: ath9k ar9271 802.11n 2.4 GHz from 2011. Atheros (now Qualcomm) released its firmware source: https://github.com/qca/open-ath9k-htc-firmware https://github.com/qca/open-ath9k-htc-firmware I have many, many these dongles :)
- fithisux 2mo agoWiFi should be like Bluetooth. One stack with generic drivers.
- ValdikSS 2mo agoYeah, somehow nobody invented HCI for Wi-Fi chips. USB has it, Bluetooth has it, but not Wi-Fi.
- ThrowawayR2 2mo ago> "Wi-Fi 8 is expected to be finalized in 2028" So we should see mainstream consumer device adaption by 2030 (not much point in having a wi-fi access point that implements pre-finalized Wi-Fi 8 if none of the client devices do) and prices become reasonable maybe by 2032? The tech is cool but it's hard to care about something that far in the future.
- cogman10 2mo agoWifi is a weird one, consumer devices arrive very quickly (often times before the standard is finalized). You can expect devices as early as next year.
- lucb1e 2mo agoI don't change phones every 3 years though, and my current AP/router is 8 years old. The only reason I got a new one is that I didn't have one with a VDSL modem built in, which we needed in our new flat. If the first devices ship in 2027 then widespread adoption is probably more like 2033 for people that routinely upgrade for fun and 2038 (or 2³¹ unix time) for those who aren't into tech
- _joel 2mo ago"Hands up who's every gotten close to the theoretical max speed of wifi 7. Ok, sure, well hands up who's even got half that... er."
- abtinf 2mo agoDumb question: why not drop/deprecate the WiFi standards and adopt 5G/6G across the board (operating on different spectrum depending on configuration)? Naively, I would assume that would save money on the BOM and make devices more flexible. Again, naively, why not build and sell consumer-grade 5G access points/routers? This new WiFi standard is far enough out (2028) that it seems reasonable to fold it into the 6G standard (early 2030s per the article)? It would be nice if all laptops were suddenly equally capable to WiFi and cellular connections.
- Petelex 2mo ago5g-NRU allows what you are speaking of, but imo still needs quite developments for actually being deployed in bands with interferance (i.e. WiFi).
- Nifty3929 2mo agoHow would I connect to my own network? Wifi and cellular solve different problems.
- fc417fc802 2mo agoThat's purely a software problem that stems from typical usecase. There's no technical reason preventing phone users from selecting the network to connect to. It's just that currently a SIM serves that purpose.
- lucb1e 2mo agoOn layer 2? I guess that would require a virtual network. For layer 3 and above, everything has an IP address so use that?
- georgeburdell 2mo agoMy semi educated guess is because different kinds of people sit on the two different standards boards, so you get siloed specs with the cross sharing of some good ideas. You could ask a similar question about HDMI vs thunderbolt.
- jychang 2mo ago
- ckocagil 2mo ago>The stated goals of Wi-Fi 8 include a 25% increase in throughput at different signal-to-interference-and-noise ratio (SINR) levels, reduce latency by 25% for the 95th percentile scenarios with latency So it is getting faster (in both senses) and doing so in scenarios that actually matter.
- thomastjeffery 2mo agoI recently had to change from wpa_supplicant to iwd to get around the 200 access point search limit. It would be nice to have fewer than 200 access points in range..
- lucb1e 2mo agoMy phone uses wpa_supplicant v2.10-devel-11 (from late 2021 I think) and I see in NeoStumbler that the record is at 227 access points (from this vantage point: https://osm.org/go/0GAnN~St0?m https://osm.org/go/0GAnN~St0?m) The query for anyone else who has that app and is curious: > .he on > select reportId, count(id) as c from WifiAccessPointEntity group by reportId order by c desc limit 10; reportId|c 123|227 > select * from PositionEntity where reportId = 123; -- find where this was Are you sure it's a wpa_supplicant limitation? It sounds like a very arbitrary number, not even 2^8=256 or something, so like it should be trivial to find and chance that constant limit in the source code, if this limit exists Edit: a quick grep through the source code (`grep -rE '[^0-9]200[^0-9]'`) doesn't reveal anything that looks very promising at first glance. I'm curious what you're running into now though
- thomastjeffery 2mo agoIt's ostensibly a configurable variable (bss_max_count). I bet your phone's system has done so. I'm talking about my laptop and NixOS, and I was definitely getting limited to 200.
- lucb1e 2mo agoHuh, why did I not see that variable in the grep results... ah, that line didn't match because I negative matched 0-9 but not 'nothing' (end of line in the config file). If it's just a configuration variable though, why bother migrating away instead of configuring it? Or even opening a ticket upstream that the 200 APs limit is causing issues if you would want to go that far. Ditching the software altogether seems radical
- 2mo ago
- MayeulC 2mo agoI read trough the planned improvements a while ago, and came to the conclusion that most would be mostly useful in ultra crowded environments such as stadiums, etc, so not very useful for a consumer. Would you agree? Roaming improvements are nice, though in practice most firmwares already implement something similar AFAIK? OpenWrt & Ubiquity Unifi devices do, though there is no cross vendor protocol. Curious to see how Wi-Fi 8 handles that. Via the wired backbone? From my understanding, the ideal solution for roaming would be that all APs identify as the same BSSID, and decide between them who answers a client, while sharing state. Scaling such a system may be hard in crowded environments. Anyway, I updated to a Wi-Fi 7 router, and it runs warm enough.
- sroussey 2mo agoUltra crowded environments would include any apartment building in the city.
- jiveturkey 2mo ago> all APs identify as the same BSSID, and decide between them who answers a client That is decidedly not a solution. Neighboring APs necessarily need to be on different channels, to avoid Co-Channel Interference (CCI). An AP doesn't answer just on BSSID but also on a specific channel.
- sroussey 2mo agoWhat they really need is cheap WiFi 8 on 2.4 channel only so IOT devices stop shipping WiFi 4 or worse and cause headaches on the network.
- kjellsbells 2mo agoHaving WiFi 8 (or even 7) on your access point is only really useful if you have a population of clients that can use the features it offers. I regularly sample the devices attached to residential wifi routers and the facts are grim: in a house of 40+ devices, two can do wifi 7, about 10% can do 6Ghz, 50 to 60% can do 5GHz but not 6GHz, and a core rump of 50% of the devices are stuck on 2.4GHz. I suspect this is because all those cheap smart home things like roku sticks and pet feeders and so on are built for cost and a decent 5Ghz chip is just too much to ask.
- jychang 2mo agoEven more important: I hope Wifi 8 makes all the good stuff MANDATORY even if it's expensive! For example, Wifi 7 doesn't make actually useful MLO mandatory. So most wifi router manufacturers - even Ubiquiti - don't implement it! What's the point of adding something to the standard if it's optional. Ideally, the standards body should make expensive stuff mandatory- then prices will come down as soon as everyone is building it, due to economics of scale.
- amluto 2mo agoUbiquiti has a half-hearted MLO implementation with AFAICT utterly silly restrictions on WPA mode.
- riobard 2mo ago> because all those cheap smart home things like roku sticks and pet feeders and so on are built for cost and a decent 5Ghz chip is just too much to ask. Cost certainly is the primary factor in the decision, but you definitely want those low-bandwidth but long-range devices OFF your precious 5GHz band. Unless you want the same crappy experience of 2.4GHz band in 5GHz.
- rrrrrrrrrrrryan 2mo agoThis is true if you only have one access point. If you have a mesh system with more than one access point, your network benefits greatly by using WiFi 7 (or 8, now) as a dedicated wireless backhaul that connects the access points to each other.
- nntwozz 2mo agoWhat about latency and jitter? I still get more ping in Counter-Strike on Wi-Fi than on Ethernet. …even in pristine conditions, excluding perfect lab conditions.
- ninkendo 2mo agoProbably never. WiFi still fundamentally works over a shared medium, by clients that talk on the same frequency, and if they interfere, they have to wait a random amount of time and then retry. Wired switches have dedicated physical cables linking to each client and can buffer packets per-client, buffers that can be flushed at optimal times. If you could guarantee that (1) you were the only client on the access point and (2) there was zero interference from any nearby access points, then I’d expect the latency/jitter to be comparable. But that’s basically impossible unless you’re inside a faraday cage with direct line of sight. People who are experts in wireless, when they have the choice, will always pick wired communications where feasible, if latency and jitter matter.
- lucb1e 2mo agoThat's the point of the article, that WiFi 8's point is lower latency and more reliability? > Instead, the organization is focusing on improving the reliability [...]. The stated goals of Wi-Fi 8 include a 25% increase in throughput at different signal-to-interference-and-noise ratio (SINR) levels, reduce latency by 25% for the 95th percentile scenarios with latency, and decrease MAC protocol data unit loss (MPDU) by 25%. Jitter not explicitly mentioned but high jitter is low reliability so it's an implicit goal. It'll simply be more stable when there are 25% fewer retransmissions needed anyway (of course that's just a goal under some assumed scenario, but say that it's 5% in your setup or whatever)
- lucb1e 2mo agoAm I understanding that graph about "distributed-tone resource units" correctly that WiFi is finally going the way of Bluetooth frequency hopping? Ever since I found out that this is possible, it seemed like the obvious better choice because it divides the spectrum across everyone equally with no configuration, whereas on WiFi you (or your router) always had to choose one channel to work on and hope for the best. It might look clear for a full minute, but then the neighbor presses 'next song' 20 seconds later and whatever channel they're on is now trying to push some megabytes of audio. Probably it also has downsides or they'd long ago have done this, though? Edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency-hopping_spread_spectrum#Technical_considerations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency-hopping_spread_spect... (used by Bluetooth) mentions also that some jurisdictions allow a 1000x higher transmit power if you hop between enough frequencies with short enough dwell times on each, which it sounds like Bluetooth would easily reach at its usual 1600 hops per second at the full 2.4 GHz unlicensed band
- roryirvine 2mo agoFHSS was actually used by the original (2 Mbps) 802.11 radio modems in the mid 90s. It wasn't until 802.11b/a came along a few years later that the world moved to DSSS (along with other innovations such as, er, proper intercompatibility between different vendors' kit!). AIUI, DSSS was necessary to make use of the full channel bandwidth, but FHSS is more resistant to interference so might be good for the warehouse use case mentioned in another top level comment.