By Erik Søe-Pedersen, Product Director for PRISME
Wi-Fi 7 is already here. Wi-Fi 8 is starting to enter the conversation. New chipsets, more intelligent networks, and AI-enabled Wi-Fi management will all play an important role in the future of the connected home.
That future is exciting. But for broadband service providers, there is a more immediate question: what happens to all the homes that will not receive new CPE in the near future?
Don’t write off your Wi-Fi 4 and 5 households
The installed base will not change overnight. Replacing customer premises equipment across thousands or millions of homes is expensive, operationally complex, and difficult to justify all at once.
This point came through clearly when I took part in the recent Wi-Fi NOW webinar, AI will redefine home Wi-Fi. The discussion covered the future of Wi-Fi, including Wi-Fi 8 and on-chip AI capabilities. But it also highlighted a very practical reality for European operators: while the industry is looking ahead to the next generation, many service providers are still managing large numbers of legacy gateways in the field.
OpenSignal data shared during the webinar showed that Wi-Fi 7 usage remains very limited across Europe, while Wi-Fi 4 and Wi-Fi 5 still represent a major part of the consumer broadband experience. That is not because operators do not see the value of newer standards: it is because hardware replacement takes time, budget, and operational capacity. As we discussed during the live session, the current memory price crisis is only adding to their caution. The higher cost and reduced availability of components for new CPE are making operators increasingly conscious of their existing legacy CPE and how they can extract the maximum performance from them.
But there’s no reason to treat the legacy devices in your installed base as a lost cause. There are ways to upgrade visibility, management, and proactive support to improve the Wi-Fi experience customers are already using today.
Solving the Wi-Fi 4 and 5 customer experience challenge
Customers don’t usually think in terms of access network, gateway standard, channel interference or device capability. They want their video call to work, their World Cup live stream to be free of buffering, their children to be able to game online without complaining. They want to know the Wi-Fi can reach all the rooms where they need it.
If that experience is poor, the broadband provider is often blamed, even when the root cause is inside the home.
This is why faster access networks do not automatically solve the Wi-Fi experience problem. Fiber matters. Higher broadband speeds matter. But, as Andrey Popov from OpenSignal noted during the webinar, fiber penetration does not automatically result in better overall connection quality when measured against consistent quality. That is an important distinction. Operators can continue investing in the access network and still face avoidable support calls if they do not have enough visibility into what is happening inside the home.
This is where telemetry and proactive service assurance become very important.
Improving legacy Wi-Fi starts with better visibility
Operators cannot improve what they cannot see.
In many homes, the access connection may be performing well, but the customer experience is being shaped by the local Wi-Fi environment: gateway placement, interference, congestion, device behavior or recurring issues that are visible in the data before they become a support call.
Without that insight, every complaint risks becoming a generic “bad broadband” problem. With better telemetry, operators can understand what is happening inside the home and decide what action is most likely to help.
That is especially valuable for older gateways. Legacy CPE may not offer the same capabilities as the latest Wi-Fi 7 hardware, but it can still provide useful data. With a CPE-agnostic solution like PRISME, operators can monitor and manage older devices in a targeted way, focusing first on the homes where legacy Wi-Fi is creating the most customer friction.
This is an important point. PRISME does not have to be an all-or-nothing deployment across the full estate from day one. It can be used to support specific parts of the installed base, such as customers with older gateways, recurring Wi-Fi complaints, low consistent quality, or high support risk.
That gives operators more choice. Some homes may need new hardware. Others may benefit from better configuration, clearer customer guidance, self-care support, or more informed agent intervention. With better data, operators can decide which route is most likely to improve the experience, rather than treating CPE replacement as the only available lever.
This also helps make hardware migration more targeted. Instead of replacing devices simply because they are old, operators can prioritize the homes where replacement will create the most customer and operational value.
AI should make proactive care more practical
AI should make proactive care more practical AI was a major theme in the Wi-Fi NOW discussion, and it will clearly play a growing role in future Wi-Fi technology. But operators do not have to wait for AI-enabled chipsets before AI can be useful. The immediate value is derived by helping support teams interpret complex home network data and turn it into practical action.
A care team does not need more raw information if it only adds complexity. It needs clearer diagnostics, likely causes, and recommended next steps. AI-supported analysis can help identify patterns, highlight recurring issues and guide agents or self-care journeys towards the most useful fix.
For customers, that means fewer repeated problems and a better chance of resolution before frustration builds. For operators, it means fewer avoidable support calls, better first-contact resolution, more targeted truck rolls, and clearer prioritization of CPE replacement.
A practical path while migration continues
Wi-Fi 6, Wi-Fi 7 and future Wi-Fi 8 deployments remain important. Operators will continue to modernize their CPE estates, and customers will benefit from the performance improvements newer standards bring.
But migration will take time. During that time, the customer experience will still be shaped by the gateways already installed in millions of homes.
A balanced Wi-Fi strategy should therefore do two things at once: prepare for the next generation, while improving the manageability of the current installed base.
That means focusing on practical actions: identifying where older Wi-Fi is creating the most customer friction, monitoring quality across legacy CPE, using telemetry to prioritize proactive support, enabling self-care where the fix is simple, and giving agents clearer diagnostics when human support is needed.
The immediate opportunity is already in customers’ homes.
For more on how preventive service assurance can help operators reduce costs, improve customer experience and fix issues before customers call, download the Proactive Broadband Playbook.
