Three in five businesses more confident in Wi-Fi investment

The Wireless Broadband Alliance’s (WBA’s) latest research indicates that Wi-Fi is regarded as critical infrastructure for enterprise operations, public services and digital transformation initiatives.

Calling it a “pivotal moment” for the global wireless ecosystem, WBA’s report shows strong confidence in Wi-Fi’s future and accelerated momentum behind next-generation technologies.

Among its chief findings is that 62% of respondents have grown more confident to invest in Wi-Fi over the past 12 months, with 18% as confident as the previous year. Wi-Fi 7 is the technology most likely to be deployed in 2026, with 38% of respondents planning deployments. Closely behind that is the impact of artificial intelligence (AI), with 32% planning to deploy AI/cognitive networks, which can transform Wi-Fi networking by improving the performance and reliability of networks.

In its WBA Industry report 2026 study, the global industry body took the opinion of 185 global participants in diverse job roles across a wide range of sectors, ranging from the C-suite and business strategy to those in research and development (R&D) and product management.

Fundamentally, the 2026 survey highlighted a positive outlook for Wi-Fi, with the WBA underlining the importance of core focus areas including OpenRoaming, Wi-Fi 7, AI-enabled Wi-Fi, QoS/QoE, security and Wi-Fi/5G convergence.

It showed strong momentum behind Wi-Fi 7 and for the use of the 6 GHz spectrum band, and growing confidence in OpenRoaming as a foundation for secure connectivity across public, private and carrier networks. The survey also detailed where respondents expect to see overall network and traffic growth. Smart Home IoT led the top three with 36%, followed by AI (33%) and industrial/manufacturing applications and IoT (24%). As to the verticals with the greatest level of traffic growth, stadiums/event venues was identified as highest with 41%.

When asked about the role of Wi-Fi in converged networks with both 5G and private enterprise implementations, responses showed the view that the technologies are complementary and together benefit organisations. Three in five (60%) said combining them would give their organisation greater enterprise flexibility. The same proportion expect Wi-Fi and 5G to co-exist, rather than be a binary choice for enterprise networks.

Respondents gave their views on what they expected to be the most important aspects of Wi-Fi in the future, with network security and privacy winning out (76%). Tied second position for the current most important aspect of Wi-Fi, both with 70% of responses, were end user experiences (quality of experience and quality of service), and seamless authentication to Wi-Fi.

Asked about the most important new or improved feature of Wi-Fi 6E and Wi-Fi 7, respondents rated multi-link operation (MLO) as the single most important at 46%, highlighting a sharp focus on latency, resilience and spectrum efficiency in dense environments. This was followed in joint second place by OFDMA uplink and downlink, and mandatory WPA3 compliance (both 33%). Multi-user MIMO uplink took third position at 32%.

The industry survey also showed the OpenRoaming standard transitioning into a period of mainstream planning, with the need for seamless onboarding and roaming between Wi-Fi and cellular networks now seen as central business drivers. Some 38% of respondents said they had already deployed a OpenRoaming and/or Passpoint-compliant network, with a further 32% wishing to deploy in 2026, and 18% in 2027.

When asked what is driving investment in OpenRoaming/Passpoint, the top three reasons given were enablement of frictionless Wi-Fi (63%), seamless access between Wi-Fi and 5G/LTE (60%) and seamless access across different networks (40%).