We’ve watched a lot of “next big things” come and go – some that genuinely changed how businesses operate, and some that turned out to be a lot of marketing noise around technology that wasn’t quite ready.
Right now, in 2026, three things are happening at once in the world of network kit that our clients keep asking us about:
- Should we be planning for WiFi 8?
- What’s all this about cloud-managed network devices?
- Is it actually worth replacing kit that still works?
The short answers, in case you don’t fancy the long version, are: not yet, yes if you can, and probably more than you think. But each of those deserves unpacking, because the right answer for your business depends on what you’ve got and what you’re trying to achieve.
So here’s the longer take.
The WiFi 8 question: ignore the hype, for now
WiFi 8 – the 802.11bn standard – is going to be the buzz of the wireless world in 2026. You’ll see it at trade shows, in vendor email campaigns, and in the trade press. Some of it will be genuinely interesting. Most of it will be people trying to sell you something you can’t actually use yet.
The wireless networking specialists at Zyxel have written a refreshingly straight piece on this and it’s worth a read. Their argument matches what we’d tell any client asking the same question.
The standard isn’t ready. WiFi 8 isn’t expected to be ratified until at least September 2028. That’s two and a half years away. Anything sold as “WiFi 8” in 2026 is being built against specifications that aren’t finalised – which means features could change, compatibility issues could emerge, and the kit you buy now might not play nicely with proper WiFi 8 client devices when those eventually arrive.
And nothing can connect to it anyway. Hardware manufacturers haven’t put WiFi 8 chipsets into laptops, phones or tablets – and they won’t, until the standard is locked down. So even if you bought “WiFi 8” access points today, you’d have nothing in your office capable of using them.
The sensible upgrade in 2026 is WiFi 7. The standard is finished. Devices everywhere support it. It’ll deliver real, immediate performance benefits and serve you well for several years before WiFi 8 is genuinely a consideration – probably 2029 or later.
If anyone’s pitching you WiFi 8 hardware right now, a healthy question to ask is: “What in my office can actually connect to this?” The answer will tell you everything.
The bigger story: cloud management is changing what IT support can deliver
This is the one that’s been quietly transforming our work over the last couple of years, and it’s worth most businesses paying attention to.
For most of the time we’ve been in business, network equipment has lived in a comms cupboard and been managed locally. If a switch needed configuring, someone logged into it directly. If a firewall rule needed changing, it was a remote session or a site visit. If an access point started misbehaving, you usually found out when users started complaining.
That’s changing fast.
A growing range of network devices – access points, switches, firewalls, NAS drives – can now be managed and monitored from the cloud. The hardware sits in your office; the management lives in a secure portal that we (or your IT team) can access from anywhere. Logs stream in real time. Alerts come through automatically. Firmware updates can be pushed centrally to every device on a schedule.
What that means in practice for businesses we look after:
We can see what’s going on. Without being on site, without needing to remote into individual boxes, we get a real-time view of how your network is performing – what’s connected, where the bottlenecks are, what’s behaving oddly. Problems get spotted before they become complaints.
The logs are actually useful. Cloud-managed devices keep richer logs and keep them for longer than older kit. When something does go wrong – or when you need to investigate a security incident or unusual activity – the data is there. With older equipment, the logs often roll over before anyone realises there was something to look at.
Things get fixed faster. A lot of network problems that used to need a site visit can now be diagnosed and resolved from the office in minutes. Less downtime for you, less disruption, fewer call-outs.
Firmware actually gets updated. This is a quietly enormous one for cyber security. Older network kit famously goes years without firmware updates because manually patching every device is a hassle nobody quite gets round to. Cloud-managed devices get pushed updates centrally – your equipment stays current, known vulnerabilities get closed, and your Cyber Essentials assessor stays satisfied.
Multi-site changes happen in one go. If you’ve got a setup spread across multiple offices in Surrey, London or anywhere else, configuration changes that used to mean visiting each site can now be rolled out from a single console.
The honest catch: most older equipment can’t do this. Cloud management usually means either replacing the device or – in some cases – adding the right licence to existing hardware that supports it but hasn’t had the functionality enabled. The mix of replace-vs-licence varies a lot by manufacturer and model, which is why an audit is usually the right starting point.
We’ve moved a lot of clients onto cloud-managed setups over the last 18 months, and the pattern is consistent: support gets faster, security gets tighter, and the day-to-day “is everything working?” anxiety gets quieter.
The hidden costs of equipment that “still works”
Here’s the bit that doesn’t show up on any quote, but is becoming impossible to ignore in 2026.
Your electricity bill
Business energy prices in the UK have come down a bit from the worst of 2022-23, but they’re still meaningfully higher than they were five years ago. And network equipment runs 24 hours a day, every day of the year.
Older switches in particular are surprisingly power-hungry. The newer generation is dramatically more efficient – often a fraction of the wattage of equipment from five or six years ago, while delivering significantly more performance. For a single switch, you might be looking at £50-£100 a year in electricity savings. Across a multi-site setup with several switches per location, it’s a recurring saving that adds up to something worth having – and it pays back a chunk of the upgrade cost over the lifetime of the equipment.
The office noise nobody mentions
This one comes up more often than you’d think.
Older switches and firewalls tend to have small, fast-spinning fans that produce a constant high-pitched whine. If your comms rack is tucked away in a cupboard far from desks, no problem. If it’s in the corner of an open-plan office, or in a small business unit where everyone shares the same room, that whine becomes part of the daily soundtrack.
New generation kit is increasingly fanless, or uses smart variable-speed fans that only spin up when the device actually warms up – which, under typical SMB load, is rarely. We’ve had multiple clients comment, weeks after a switch replacement, that the office is noticeably calmer. It’s not the headline reason to upgrade, but it’s a real quality-of-life thing that nobody warns you about until you experience the change.
Reliability creeping in the wrong direction
Network equipment has a useful life. Capacitors degrade. Power supplies wear out. Fans accumulate dust and start to fail. The probability of a hardware failure on a five-or-six-year-old switch is meaningfully higher than on a current-generation device – and when network kit fails, it tends to take down everything plugged into it.
For most businesses, the cost of an unexpected outage during the working day – lost productivity, frustrated customers, scrambling support calls – is a lot more than the cost of a planned, scheduled refresh.
The performance ceiling you’re not seeing
Older 1Gb switches and pre-WiFi 6 access points have become the bottleneck on a lot of modern networks. You can have fast internet, fast laptops, fast cloud applications – and still feel like everything’s slow, because the network in the middle is throttling everything.
This shows up most obviously when you upgrade something else (a new internet line, faster laptops) and don’t see the improvement you expected. Often the older network kit is the missing piece.
So when does upgrading actually make sense?
There’s no universal answer, but there are a few clear signals worth watching for:
- Your equipment is five or more years old and starting to feel slow or unreliable
- You’re working towards or maintaining Cyber Essentials and your firmware update process is patchy
- You’ve moved more workloads to the cloud and are hitting bandwidth or wireless coverage limits
- Your IT support feels slower than it should, with too many issues needing site visits
- Your electricity bill has gone up and you’ve got a lot of always-on network equipment
- The noise from your comms rack is becoming a complaint rather than a background hum
If two or three of those apply, an honest assessment of what you’ve got is probably overdue.
And to be clear: an upgrade doesn’t have to mean replacing everything at once. A phased approach – starting with whatever’s giving you the most pain, the biggest security gap, or the highest electricity draw – is usually the sensible path. We’ve helped plenty of businesses spread a network refresh over 12-24 months in a way that’s manageable both budget-wise and operationally.
The short version
- WiFi 8 is going to be hyped relentlessly in 2026 but isn’t a sensible buy yet. Standard isn’t ratified until 2028, and no devices can connect to it. WiFi 7 is the right move for now.
- Cloud-managed network devices are genuinely changing what we can deliver as your IT partner – better visibility, better security, faster fixes, less disruption. Some of your existing kit may just need a licence; some may need replacing.
- Older equipment costs more than you think – in electricity, in noise, in the risk of failure, and in the performance ceiling it imposes on everything else.
If you’re not sure what’s in your comms rack, how old it is, or what would benefit from an upgrade or a cloud-management licence, we’re happy to take a proper look.
Have a chat about your network
After 35 years of supporting businesses across Surrey, London and the South East, we’ve got a pretty good eye for which upgrades pay for themselves and which can wait.
We’ll review what you’ve got, flag what’s reaching end of life, identify what could be cloud-managed with a simple licence change, and give you a clear picture of what’s worth doing now versus next year.
No pressure, no jargon. Just a straightforward conversation.
Get in touch with Sprint Infinity →
Or call our Guildford office directly on 01483 238260.