Asus is leveraging CES attention to hint at some of what we might expect from a future generation of Wi-Fi in the home with its ROG NeoCore, a proof-of-concept Wi-Fi 8 router that shows off an early version of where home networking performance might be headed. It’s not a production device, but it is a sign: The next era of Wi-Fi will turn from headline speeds to consistent, low-latency responsiveness — and router design might need to catch up.
What Asus actually showed with its ROG NeoCore concept
The NeoCore is a striking one: an angular icosahedron, all vents and faceted panels, with what looks like three Ethernet ports and a power input buried in one face.
Asus is keeping mum about the chipset, radio count, and band configuration, further emphasizing that this is still a concept device. The company did mention it intends to sell its first Wi-Fi 8 home routers later this year, but whether any of them will look anything like this prototype is anybody’s guess.
Instead of specs, Asus focused on results. According to the company, Wi-Fi 8 will provide up to 2x better midrange throughput, twice as much IoT coverage, and up to six times lower P99 latency compared with Wi-Fi 7. Those are big numbers, and they reflect a generation of the industry that’s more focused on fixing dead zones than upping connection speeds to levels unattainable by consumer devices, as well as general performance at room-to-room distances and latency that doesn’t go haywire when the network gets congested.
Why Wi-Fi 8 is all about stability and low latency
Wi-Fi generations were designated by a sequence of numbers — 3, 4, 5, and so on. Today’s bottlenecks are different. Houses are filled with gadgets, apartment buildings are RF battlegrounds, and more workloads — from cloud gaming to AR collaboration — are ultra-sensitive to jitter, not only average bandwidth. This is why Asus is talking about P99 latency, which measures the worst 1% of delays. Drop that tail and the video calls won’t glitch out, game inputs will be instantaneous, and your smart-home gadgets will behave predictably once more.
Look for Wi-Fi 8 to extend multi-link operation that debuted with Wi-Fi 7, enabling clients to take better advantage of multiple bands simultaneously for greater resiliency and smoother roaming. Research in the IEEE 802.11 Working Group has also focused on smarter scheduling, saving bandwidth from interference, and adding more uplink capacity — humdrum acronyms that will result in Wi-Fi working better under disordered, real-life conditions.
The pre-standard reality check for early Wi-Fi 8 gear
There’s a reason Asus is careful not to refer to NeoCore as a product. The next 802.11 protocol (Wi-Fi 8) has not even been ratified by the IEEE; nor has the Wi-Fi Alliance defined a certification program for it. In its latest public updates, the standards body aimed to finalize it later in the decade, and features are still shifting as technical groups hammer out the details.
We’ve been here before. Early “draft‑N” routers arrived before the final 802.11n spec by years, and first-wave Wi-Fi 7 systems shipped prior to full certification. Some of those products got better with firmware updates, but some features changed or never arrived. “Early adopters” of first-gen Wi-Fi 8 routers should prepare for swift firmware updates, ever-evolving interop testing, and performance that may vary while standards bake out.
Rethinking router design for dense, multi-link Wi-Fi 8
And the unorthodox shape of NeoCore? That’s more than a design flex. Radios add up and multi-link is the new norm — antenna placement and isolation are getting tougher inside traditional flat slabs. A chiseled shell can serve to space out components and add self-interference rejection, while the copious vents strongly signal more beef-tacular CPUs and concurrent radio chains that require even better thermal headroom.
If Wi-Fi 8 doubles down on consistent coverage, we should see more models blurring lines between standalone routers and mesh nodes. Backhaul links, wired or wireless, are going to have as much of an impact on performance as client links, and you’re going to require multi-gigabit LAN/WAN ports in order not to choke breakthrough midrange throughput. NeoCore reveals at least three Ethernet ports, although high-end designs generally push more aggressively toward 2.5GbE (if not higher) to handle fiber and cable upgrades.
What to watch next as Wi-Fi 8 moves toward standardization
Chipset roadmaps from Broadcom, Qualcomm, and MediaTek will clue us into when Wi-Fi 8 silicon really is done, as well as what features make the first pass. Certification guidelines from the Wi-Fi Alliance will delineate must-have capabilities and rules of interoperability. The use of 6 GHz spectrum, including standard-power operations using automated frequency coordination, which are still key to providing robust coverage, will be defined by regulators such as the FCC and Ofcom.
Independent testing by labs that focus on wireless benchmarking will also be instrumental in verifying claims such as 6x lower P99 latency. Only real-world stress tests in conditions like multi-unit dwellings and mixed IoT houses will be able to tell whether Wi-Fi 8’s promise extends beyond marketing slides.
For now, Asus’s NeoCore is more of a product guiding star than an actual, discrete announcement. It indicates that the next generation of routers will focus on predictable performance, more intelligent multi-link operation, and designs optimized for thermal and RF complexity. If that’s the future of routers, it will mean Wi-Fi is about to get uglier but a lot more reliable where people use it.
