The past year of wireless innovation may have lacked a major headline, but it did provide a steady stream of advances that marked a tipping point for a handful of technologies and end applications. The launch of the iPhone 16 provided Wi-Fi 7 with a watershed moment as it flipped from early adoption to mass deployment. Bluetooth® Low Energy (LE) remained the fastest growing Bluetooth segment thanks to robust take-up rates in wearables, smart homes, IoT infrastructure and growing interest in features like channel sounding and high data throughput (HDT). Ultra-wideband (UWB) and 5G gained ground in automotive as keyless entry and telematics enablers, while the healthcare industry continued laying the groundwork for AI-enabled wireless medical devices.

Wi-Fi 7 Moves From Early Adoption to Volume Production

By the start of 2025, Wi-Fi 7 – still fresh from IEEE standard ratification – debuted as the new short-range communications pathway for the iPhone 16. With multiple frequency bands operating simultaneously, Wi-Fi 7 was designed to drive faster speeds, lower latency and more reliable connectivity. The new standard quickly assumed its place at the flagship wireless technology for a host of smartphone platforms, laptops, home routers and portable hotspots as large venues such as airports began rolling out Wi-Fi 7 networks. 

Technically, Wi-Fi 7’s big selling points are wide 320-MHz channels and 4096-QAM modulation, which deliver multi-gigabit peak throughput. Those same features made life interesting for manufacturers and test engineers, stretching the performance limits of some RF front-ends and test equipment as Wi-Fi 7 demanded high-volume test strategies.

From a deployment perspective, Wi-Fi 6 had already introduced OFDMA and other efficiency improvements, but in doing so made coexistence with legacy Wi-Fi challenging. Networks often had to choose between “modern” and “legacy” operating modes, losing some functionality when older devices were present. Wi-Fi 7 addressed that problem with preamble puncturing, which allows a router to carve out and “puncture” a portion of a channel that is experiencing interference, instead of rendering the entire channel unusable.

In practical terms, 2025 was the year Wi-Fi 7 became both faster and easier to deploy than its predecessor, in larger part by reducing interference with installed Wi-Fi 5/6 gear. For end users, that meant more consistent throughput in crowded homes and offices and lower latency for gaming and video conferencing. 

Bluetooth Sharpened Its Focus

Bluetooth’s story over the past 12 months focused heavily on two areas: precise location detection using channel sounding and the long-gestating HDT mode.

Channel sounding – a star feature of the Bluetooth 6 roadmap – improves how well Bluetooth devices can locate each other. Instead of relying only on received signal strength, channel sounding uses phase and frequency information from multiple antennas to estimate distance and direction with far better accuracy. That’s crucial for asset tracking, indoor navigation, secure access and proximity-based applications. Test and measurement efforts in 2025 helped to verify these new ranging behaviors in real-world multipath environments. 

In parallel, the industry made progress standardizing HDT. For several years, major silicon vendors had shipped proprietary “boosted” Bluetooth modes, each with its own branding and slightly different implementations, to deliver higher data rates for features like lossless audio. In 2025, the Bluetooth SIG’s work on HDT began harmonizing those individual efforts into a common specification capable of about 8 Mbps, enabling high-resolution and spatial audio with better interoperability. 

* Optional Rate | Source: Bluetooth SIG

The challenges here were twofold. First, vendors had to enable HDT without blowing up power budgets in earbuds, wearables and battery-powered sensors. Second, interoperability testing became much more demanding when validating location accuracy and multi-megabit streaming. 

Automotive High Notes Featured Digital Keys and Telematics

Automotive was a mixed economic story in 2025, but the wireless content in cars continued to climb. Two trends stood out: UWB-based digital keys and 5G-enabled telematics.

On the access side, UWB moved closer to becoming the de-facto technology for secure keyless entry. The Car Connectivity Consortium (CCC) expanded its Digital Key Certification Program to cover Bluetooth LE and UWB in addition to near-field communication (NFC), ensuring that phones and cars from different vendors can interoperate securely. Meanwhile, organizations such as FiRa Consortium and CCC coordinated on UWB ranging and security testing, bridging what were historically separate consumer-electronics and automotive worlds.

The challenge for in-vehicle wireless connectivity is that UWB has to coexist with Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and cellular systems in the same space, and in some bands nearby Wi-Fi deployments can trample UWB channels. This drove new work on UWB channel harmonization, coexistence strategies and more rigorous validation of ranging accuracy and resilience in noisy environments.

In parallel, car telematics and connectivity continued moving toward 5G adoption. Market studies projected automotive-grade 5G module revenue in the $3.75 billion range for 2025, with nearly 21 percent CAGR through the next decade as modules feed telematics control units and network access devices. These units carry emergency-call services, over-the-air software updates, fleet telemetry and, increasingly, data for ADAS and autonomous driving features.

Here the engineering challenges revolve around reliability and lifecycle: radios must survive harsh thermal and mechanical environments for 10-15 years, maintain secure connectivity over multiple cellular generations and coexist with the car’s internal networks. Module-based designs and more integrated chip-on-board solutions both saw interest in 2025, with OEMs balancing flexibility, certification complexity and cost.

Wireless Medical Devices: Laying the Foundation for AI

Wireless medical devices weathered a year marked by cautious optimism, with Mordor Intelligence estimating the market generated $31.43 billion.

Growth is expected to include wireless infusion pumps and ECG patches, Bluetooth-enabled blood pressure cuffs and glucose monitors and data-connected bedside monitors, but the challenges are substantial. Devices must be tested to meet strict safety and cybersecurity requirements, operate reliably in noisy, RF-dense hospital environments and run for days or weeks on cell-sized batteries.

In retrospect, 2025 may have been a foundational year in which healthcare connectivity and data pipelines were hardened to support AI-enhanced wearables and similarly ambitious deployments in the years to come.

The Rearview Mirror Reveals What Lies Ahead

For many wireless technologies, 2025 was more a year of maturation than movement. Wi-Fi 7 became deployable at scale; Bluetooth updated a roadmap to higher throughput; cars added more radios for keys and telematics; and wireless medical devices edged closer to AI implementation. 

The threads that touch each area includes coexistence with legacy systems, the move from pilot projects to mass deployment and the need to turn raw bandwidth into dependable, often safety-critical services. These solutions are setting the stage for what comes next: Wi-Fi 8, 6G, AI-native radio networks and data-centric healthcare.