At DVT Forum 2026 (Wi-Fi NOW report, October 15) Intel described its lab for Wi-Fi 7 and the upcoming Wi-Fi 8. It is not a set of shielded chambers but a floor of about 21,000 sq ft (roughly 1,950 m²) with real cubicles, across which robots carry client devices. What gets measured is not a speed record next to the access point but the handoff between access points: loss, latency, outage duration. The thesis of the speaker, Mohammad Mansour (Intel): peak speed is no longer the yardstick of platform quality. Candela is developing LANforge in the same direction. A basic version of such a test bed can be built without 2,000 m².
The site runs like a pipeline: driver and firmware regression after every change, 2.4/5/6 GHz bands, access points from different manufacturers, clients on Windows, Linux, Apple, Android and Chrome.
Three kinds of motion: robots carry clients along fixed routes run after run; XY tables move a device across a grid of points; turntables rotate it through 360°, exposing the dependence on the orientation of a laptop's antennas. The robot's coordinates serve as ground truth for verifying 802.11mc/az ranging on a route of about 60 m.
The numbers: on Wi-Fi 7 with a 320 MHz channel Intel achieved more than 4 Gbit/s in a real office space. The figure itself is not the point. During roaming, the team runs video conferencing, voice and streaming in parallel and records where the user would notice the handoff. Mansour noted that a conducted RF path with an attenuator does not always reproduce real over-the-air roaming. Priorities for Wi-Fi 8 (IEEE 802.11bn, Ultra High Reliability): long range, seamless roaming, efficiency at high density. Peak PHY rates are not on the list.
TR-398 Issue 4 from the Broadband Forum adds Wi-Fi 7 tests to Issue 3: 6.5.5 Preamble Puncturing and 6.5.6 MLO (eMLSR), and 320 MHz appears in Peak Performance. Pass/fail criteria for some of the procedures are still being finalized.
The limits of the methodology lie exactly where Intel is looking. Roaming exists in TR-398 only as Mesh Roam (6.6.3); for ordinary access points there is no mobility test. All measurements take place in chambers, through attenuators and a turntable, with 32 Intel BE200 stations acting as clients. That provides repeatability but does not answer how a client will handle a handoff between three access points in a hallway with concrete columns. SmallNetBuilder notes that the specification allows variation in test bed setup, results from different labs are hard to compare, and some thresholds are too lenient.
Candela describes three tiers of validation: RF chambers, shielded rooms and real test houses. Each tier has its own tool:
The direction is the same as Intel's: real environment, motion, automation. The difference is scale and availability: CanBEE can be bought or ordered as Test-as-a-Service.
A sensible minimum for an integrator:
The main challenge is OTA repeatability: people, doors and neighboring networks change the results from run to run. Overnight runs and a fixed route matter more than expensive mechanics.
The "up to 4 Gbit/s" figure in a datasheet does not protect you from complaints that a Teams call drops when someone walks from their office to a meeting room. Such dropouts reduce productivity and undermine trust in the IT department, and in clinics and on factory floors they cost even more. Testing "on the move" before a purchase or before a firmware update is an order of magnitude cheaper than redoing the Wi-Fi after rollout. An Intel-grade test bed requires a separate building; a "chambers + office route + overnight automation" setup fits within a pilot budget.
If you are choosing access points or preparing a Wi-Fi upgrade, do not stop at measuring speed next to the access point. Contact TEST4NET: we will discuss a roaming scenario for your floor and your client devices and propose a test program.