What is the future of WiFi technology and how can we be ready for future ?

Currently Wifi is using IEEE 802.11ac which uses 5 Ghz band and also supports legacy 2.4 GHz band clients. In terms of antenna, routers with 8 antennas (4x4) and direction beam forming and client bandwidth/priority allocation are inn the market. Their is a proposal to develop a router with 16 antennas (8x8 MIMO). Some routers support two or three 5 Ghz bands and one 2.4 Ghz bands. However this is just an implementation strategy with little or no  benefits on a per client basis but just increases the overall capacity of router to handle more clients each able to work at possibly much lower link speed than what speed label you see on the box. Of-course many homes may just do fine with this.

Technology wise the Standard work is happening on Gigabit Wifi (802.11ad or WiGig) as well as competing WirelessHD. Both these standards use the 60 Ghz band. One important consequence of this (by design to escape interference) is range of Wireless signals is further limited. 5 GHz range is less than 2.4 Ghz and 60 Ghz will be much less, possibly the size of the room and may not be able to penetrate concrete walls.

So the future of High Speed Wireless LAN is most likely "Multiple Access Points/Routers" in one home, probably one per room and supported by an underlying Wired Gigabit Ethernet LAN to hook up each room to the router in a broadband entry location.  Of course for this to take root all clients also need to change (for 60 Ghz frequency support) and that may take a long time(5+ years) to materialize with intermediate implementations supporting all 3 bands (2.4, 5 and 60 Ghz bands)

This is ONE MORE reason on why we insists that every room have Wired LAN connectivity by at-least having one LAN Port in every room and having structured cat 6/6a wiring.

- Suman Kumar Luthra @ APRC-P3 Telecom Sub-Committee