Waves & Wires.

From predictions to performance: networking trends ahead in 2026

• Offical Zyxel Networks Podcast • Season 4 • Episode 1

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What did 2025 get right - and where is networking heading next? In this episode, we kick things off with a sharp, engaging recap of the biggest networking predictions from 2025, breaking down what materialised and what didn't quite make it.

From there, we look ahead to 2026 with a dive into the trends redefining connectivity. We explore the rise of high-capacity networks built to support AI-driven workloads, the security and the industry-wide push toward multi-gigabit speeds from the core to the edge.

Whether you’re designing networks, securing them, or simply tracking where the technology is headed, this episode delivers practical insight and future-focused context to help you stay ahead. Tune in to understand what’s coming - and how to prepare for it.

Michel Nicolai:

Hi, I'm Kevin Drinkall. Hi, and I'm Michel Nicolai, and we welcome you to Zyxel Networks Podcast.

Kevin Drinkall:

We've been in the network industry for over 15 years, and in these podcasts we want to try and untangle the world of networking, debunk some of those myths, explain some real-world examples along the way, to help you make better choices about selecting the right tech, product, and even help you guys build faster, more reliable, scalable networks, or just to keep your kids happy at home. Well, welcome back for another episode, and in this episode we're going to talk about some of the trends, but welcome back from your break, everybody.

Michel Nicolai:

Yeah, happy new year, everyone.

Kevin Drinkall:

So today we have uh Hugh Simpson join us. Hi, it's good to be back.

Michel Nicolai:

Thank you. Yeah, good to see you here back on the podcast show.

Kevin Drinkall:

And happy new year to everybody as well. Happy New Year, thank you. Thank you. So let's talk about some of those trends in 2026. But but let's before we do that, maybe we should have a bit of a recap on did we predict well in in 2025? That now that's what we need to look at, right? So last year we looked at uh some of the trends, and I think we started off the year by you know talking about Wi-Fi 7, uh multi-gig as well. So, you know, what what happened? Did it did it work?

Hugh Simpson:

I would say Wi-Fi 7 worked. You know, we've certainly come out with a full portfolio, we've certainly seen the uptake, etc., moving in that direction. So absolutely, yeah. I think I think we scored on that one. I think that's a positive. We moved to Wi-Fi 7.

Kevin Drinkall:

And multig, I I mean the trend started. I think how can I say the the the drive of Wi-Fi 7 is the is the key to driving multi-gig. So with Wi-Fi 7, we did see uh multigig start to take off, but I think it has lots more to go.

Hugh Simpson:

Oh yeah, we've got there's a lot, lot more to go with multigig. And yeah, it just didn't really pick up as or ramp up as much as we thought it would do.

Kevin Drinkall:

So no, but I think one that we definitely missed was, and I think a lot of people out there missed was Windows, Microsoft Windows, end of life in Windows 10. And you know, at the beginning, forcing a lot of people to really upgrade their machines.

Michel Nicolai:

Yeah, and they had to change their budget, yeah, and choose for something else, yeah. And you can only spend your money once. So yeah, that was something that impacted uh a lot of things.

Kevin Drinkall:

That's uh Hugh and I we were looking at some of the stats in the summer period. I think I remember something like desktops were in Europe had grown like 45% in sales.

Hugh Simpson:

And also CPUs as well. The you know, again, the AI influence has really driven that market as well. But CPU and components, PC components has really gone up.

Michel Nicolai:

Yeah, if you talk to distributors, you hear the same thing. Yeah, those those products they went crazy. Laptops, desktops, and components, like Hugh is saying, it is uh yeah, it's a large numbers, yeah, as we saw.

Kevin Drinkall:

What do we predict for 2026? For me, I think we have sort of four key points. Yeah, four key points would be good, yeah. Yeah, I think we should uh kick off with. I I definitely think cloud-first networking is definitely uh the trend on the cards for 2026. What does that actually mean? It means that you know people are driving their uh manageability and connectivity services into the cloud.

Hugh Simpson:

And it's not new, right? It's not a it's not something that's new that's come out and it's new and funky, etc. It's just the increase. You know, more and more people we're gonna see going for this cloud networking and cloud first. We've heard the expression Wi-Fi first for a long time. Now cloud first for networking.

Michel Nicolai:

Not only people, yeah. I think a lot of appliances are also still moving in that direction, yeah. So cloud is still an ongoing thing also for next year.

Kevin Drinkall:

You know, when we look at some of the stats for the whole channel, uh, 70% of SMBs uh what their workloads are projected to be running in cloud or some hybrid environment over 2026, right? So clearly it's not just networking, right? It's also everything else as well that goes around it. So there's still a trend to move to cloud. Like you say, it's not new, it's just continuing that growth and that pattern.

Hugh Simpson:

Yeah, no, cloud's been there. You know, we we've already seen the adoption of AWS Azure uh SASI-based applications, etc., and everything else has gone in that direction, right? So, you know, networking is now really maturing up in that in that space, right? And it should be your first to go, right? It should be your first point of call.

Kevin Drinkall:

As customers realize that this is the I would say this fixes many of their challenges, and I think we should talk about in a bit of depth when we go into some of the other uh key points as well. I think some people don't realise they're actually using that much cloud today anyway, and when they look at how it benefits them versus doing you know on-premise, etc., then then the the migration is very simple, it's a straightforward.

Hugh Simpson:

Yeah, yeah, and and absolutely. When you've started using it, see all of its benefits, see its functionality. It is just yeah, why haven't I done this earlier, right?

Kevin Drinkall:

Well, I mean it allows you to leverage from AI, right, to give us sort of positive impacts on performance in if especially for networking from our point of view. So we have Nebula, our cloud networking platform, but for us, we utilize that the AI tools to you know simplify but still give all that access accessibility to all those controls, right? And that really improves the performance around what the product does, right?

Hugh Simpson:

And where are these AI tools hosted?

Michel Nicolai:

Oh, they're all in the cloud, of course. Yeah, and a lot a lot about security as well, yeah, with AI.

Kevin Drinkall:

It is I think you know, you can't really do uh real security without leveraging from cloud in some way, right? I mean, if you look at either the standard functions in a cybersecurity solution, you need sandboxing, content filtering, application control, all these elements to keep them up to date, they need to be they need to leverage from cloud in the first place, right?

Hugh Simpson:

Yeah, and the AI elements that are within them as well. You know, and that drives the more security, the better we have.

Kevin Drinkall:

Yeah, and also that that also helps us with those key performance things, right? Because as the the the need for cybersecurity increases, the the the connectivity speed, the demand, the the amount of users.

Michel Nicolai:

Complex, don't forget about the complexity. Absolutely, yeah.

Kevin Drinkall:

So and AI gives us that that that approach where it makes it accessible to everyday users, right? So that they can use security and protect themselves. And you know, we're in a world where you've got high performing networks now, right? So Which brings us on to our next yeah, yeah, exactly.

Michel Nicolai:

Yeah, and and as you mentioned, yeah, we we started with cloud, but if you look at the data centers, the growth there, yeah, to accommodate all our requests that we do to the AI and uh to resolve things or make things easier or have quicker foundings or anything, yeah, there's a big impact on that as well, yeah.

Kevin Drinkall:

Well, I mean if you think about the the data data center side, right? It's a good reflection of the demand that's coming from cloud networking or even from cloud applications. You know, over over this year it's estimated to be like fifty billion uh US dollars uh that's a lot of money in in investment in this uh in this in this growth, right?

Hugh Simpson:

So surely that's just your paycheck.

Kevin Drinkall:

Yeah, I wish Living a Dream. If only it's more like 50 pounds.

Hugh Simpson:

Yes, you're right. No, but high performing networks are always gonna come, right? The the this is we've this is a continuing trend from last year, right? We're gonna see it continue again into this year. You know, we're moving far more into Wi-Fi 7, for instance. You know, that that gives us the speed, the density, the reliability that we're all needing to be within our networks. Yeah, and again, we're gonna see this multi-gig continue.

Michel Nicolai:

So again, yeah, because it needs to be connected as well, yeah.

Hugh Simpson:

So again, we're seeing that jump, you know, 2.5 gig to 10 gig to 25 gig to 100 gig, etc. And that's becoming more uh accessible to our S and B partners, right?

Kevin Drinkall:

Well, I mean the drive is to go wireless first, right? In everything. And uh ultimately access point needs to be connected to take the load, right? So and that means that we don't want that bottleneck. And we said it last year, and we're gonna say it again. You know, we've gone past that one gig barrier by a long shot now.

Michel Nicolai:

So Yeah, but think about how fast laptops and desktops 2.5 gigabit as a default. Yeah, it's getting more and more, yeah. If you buy a new laptop or PC, it is now we see more and more and multi-gig already on those devices. Yeah, and we need and we need that, of course, yeah, to to let that technology grow.

Kevin Drinkall:

Yeah, I mean, of course, if it comes with a uh even comes with a network adapter on it, right? So, you know, or they leverage from the latest Wi-Fi 7 chipset, right? So and you know, now we're seeing like the 1 gig, the 2.5 gig, the 5 gig, and the 10 gig, and at some point you'll see 25 gig in switching as well, right?

Hugh Simpson:

Yeah, and the 100 gig as well, which we've got already.

Kevin Drinkall:

So we start to see that the the backhaul part is now leveling up with the demand for the front end of Wi-Fi 7 as it continues to drive, right?

Hugh Simpson:

And it's not just you know, speeds of feeds, etc. It's uh optimization of the traffic. You know, we've the internet will always be a slight bottleneck for us in in a lot of cases, and we need to optimize that. We need to understand it, we need to um have those security devices that have that and allow those high performing networking to continue.

Kevin Drinkall:

Yeah, so I mean in our portfolio we have the USG Flex H, right, that reflects that. So that has multi-gig on board and even 10 gig on on some of the higher end models, right? So we see that that that you know that's there in terms of performance as well. And I think when you talk about the Wi-Fi 7 element, right, to get that speed, you're now seeing the the use of used techniques like um multi-link operation or MLO and using that tri-band, you know, the the all three bands that are now available as well to us as devices start to play catch-up as well, right? This year, I would say we will start to hear about Wi-Fi 8.

Hugh Simpson:

Yeah, absolutely. I think we will. Um, it's kind of there's little little noises out there, etc. You know. So uh yeah, we're definitely here about Wi-Fi 8 this year.

Kevin Drinkall:

We're still just not quite ready yet. So, but uh anyway, there will be rumblings of Wi-Fi 8 issue.

Hugh Simpson:

And again, you know, if we look if we look back in history, if we look back in time and analysis on our on our networks and on our cloud platform, you know, the number of clients is gonna grow as well, right? We you know, we were I was half expecting that to happen last year, and now this year, I expect that to explode in Wi-Fi 7 clients finally appearing.

Michel Nicolai:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'd like to say they've been here a long time.

Hugh Simpson:

I think they've been here a long time, right? But actually, when we look at the data and we look at what people are using, it just isn't happening. People are still using some of those old devices. So, again, for a hyper, we can build these high performance networks, but the client needs to have the right connectivity to utilize it.

Kevin Drinkall:

Yeah, so I mean, you know, and obviously, like we'd said before, you know, some of that cybersecurity functionality will take centre stage in optimizing the traffic, right? And giving us that quality of service over application management.

Hugh Simpson:

So we can we can definitely say a trend and a continuing trend will be that we're still using Teams and Zoom this year, right? And we will still be saying your mic is still muted, right?

Kevin Drinkall:

Yeah. Yeah, but Skype's gone. Yeah, yeah, but Skype's definitely gone. Absolutely, yeah. So and I think some of the other areas where definitely, you know, from our point of view, we've got Nebula as our cloud-first networking approach, right? But the network automation is a key key element as well. And I think that trend continues, right? Because as Michelle mentioned, right, the game is more complicated, more complex. But the I would say not also the skill set is also not there as well, right?

Michel Nicolai:

So we need to find a balance between how we're gonna use our automation, how we exactly, and and especially in our businesses, yeah, SMB market, yeah. We need simple solutions to build sometimes complicated things, yeah. And if we can help with Nebula to establish that, yeah, why not? Yeah, we we do a lot of things to to help our our customers to to make it more easy uh to build their network.

Kevin Drinkall:

Yeah, so I mean definitely there's a trend for this uh network as a code where we're doing automatic configurations and deployments, right? And also where we do some kind of centralized policy-based configurations and even automatic provisioning, right? It's all very key key process.

Michel Nicolai:

Yeah, that's how we started it, yeah? To do all the configuration virtually and then bring it to the customer, plug it on, and you're up and running in two minutes. Yeah, that's the thing that we want to achieve.

Hugh Simpson:

You know, automation just makes those mundane tasks so much easier, right?

Kevin Drinkall:

Yeah, I mean that's the cornerstone of Nebula, right?

Hugh Simpson:

So makes Nebula sexy again, right? Or networking, sorry, sexy again, right? Because that's what it needs to be, you know.

Kevin Drinkall:

That's the new slogan, isn't it? Yeah, that's the thing. Make Nebula sexy. Nice. But I mean, you know, uh we often have a joke, right? But we don't we we shouldn't rely on somebody checking dashboards or just looking looking at a thing. We need to have some automation to try and fix the problem, try to auto-correct the problem and then notify somebody if something doesn't work right.

Hugh Simpson:

So Yeah, let let the reseller know before you know the customers started to pick up the phone, which they probably won't do, right? Because the trend is that I text everything, can message everybody, etc., rather than actually physically speak to anybody. But again, the automation just reduces that.

Kevin Drinkall:

Well, in the end, it gives us, you know, I mean, if you're an managed service provider, right, it it allows us uh as an MSP to deliver efficiency, which obviously ultimately means better margins, right? Or if you know, cost-effective approach to delivering the services. Because ultimately you don't want to spend lots of time fault-finding, you need to get to the answers as quickly as possible, right? Yeah. So, you know, and the whole idea is fewer manual tasks, fewer deployment issues, and faster deployments, uh, and less downtime. I mean, obviously that comes down to reliability of product plus plus managing the product, right?

Michel Nicolai:

Yeah, but think about our our our firmware auto-deployment thing. That's that's a great thing. It saves a lot of time and issues, yeah.

Kevin Drinkall:

Yeah, I mean we did some calculation, right, where it saves you, you know, uh like hundreds of hours depending on how many devices you've got, you know, a year. So using cloud, just that alone makes it worthwhile, right? And not to mention all the other functionality that we add in that can automate. You know, you want to get away from those common questions or quote common calls on the last thing on Friday that my Wi-Fi is not working, right? Exactly.

Hugh Simpson:

Yeah, yeah, and and and if you if you could see it, the eyes rolled at that point, right? Yeah, we've all received those calls. It's five o'clock, the network's down. Why didn't you call earlier? Why didn't you alert? What did you do? We just don't want that to happen anyway.

Kevin Drinkall:

Yeah, and by leveraging AI uh in the nebula cloud, for example, for our for our solution, I think that's definitely a trend is looking at tools consolidation and how they're going to bring it all together. I mean, they call it tool sprawl, right? To reduce the amount of tools. And also you don't have to invest in so much uh retraining as well, right? Uh uh and one of the things that for certainly for Zizel is that you know the nebula platform, it's very intuitive. So actually the the amount of training required is very, very minimal, right, for everyday tasks.

Michel Nicolai:

And if you don't know, ask AI. Yeah. Even there.

Hugh Simpson:

Great tool. Finds those oddities which are hidden away that you think, where is it? Yeah.

Kevin Drinkall:

You just type it in an ask for it and it'll it'll point you in the right direction. So we have all those kind of tools built into there, right? And a really key thing that's going to happen in 2026 is people need to be absolutely application aware, which which you need to learn. That's right, yeah. I mean, like we said before, things are getting more complicated, it's harder to understand where where things are, what what things are, and certainly uh center stage of that is cybersecurity, you know, box basically.

Michel Nicolai:

Exactly. Take the the USG flex h in there with your gold security pack, and then you can see everything what is in your network, and you can manage that, you can control it, you can let's say bandwidth manage it. So yeah, that's the way to go.

Hugh Simpson:

You know, we talk about these high performance networking, etc., and and then you've got to understand yeah, great. And all of these clients are joining that network, but the internet hasn't particularly grown or gone alongside this growth on the land. So therefore, we've got to understand the applications, and that really is key.

Kevin Drinkall:

Yeah, and I think that optimization comes from using key tools like AI, uh, you know, bandwidth management tools, you know, or and that's basically the cybersecurity box doing all the work.

Hugh Simpson:

And prioritising. Yeah, absolutely. You know, and it might be a bit of an old thing, you know, it might be something that happened 20 years ago, right? But now it's back again, right? And you know, understanding these applications, managing them, bandwidth limiting them, prioritizing and also let's be certain on this blocking some as well.

Michel Nicolai:

Yeah, not maybe on only on the gateway, yeah, but even on the edge of your network, yeah. For instance, control it on your Wi-Fi access point, for instance, yeah, to cut it down there already before it enters the network. Yeah. Yeah. That could be a really good solution to go for.

Kevin Drinkall:

Yeah, we have uh connect and protect that you could add to the access point, right, where you can do some of these elements as well, right? So, like you say, you don't even have to let it get to the gateway, you can let it you know really manage it before it enters the network. So you're not carrying it across that network as well. And also, there are things that you know require other types of security, like IoT devices, right? And and other applications which are much needier in their requirements. And whether we realise it or not, we've moved to the cloud with a lot of applications, right?

Hugh Simpson:

Yeah, we could say you know, is IoT a trend for this year, or was it actually last year? I think it was last year, you know, the amount of uh IoT devices that suddenly appeared onto people's networks is really important. And again, you want that prioritization of that data, you know, and the security. And the security and the security, definitely.

Kevin Drinkall:

Yeah, because that's something I think a lot of people didn't really I wouldn't say not pay attention to, but just didn't really understand the impact it could have, because they're the devices that are often quite vulnerable, you know. Uh a lot of those devices.

Hugh Simpson:

And we saw last year we saw a couple of those uh legislations come out trying to trying to lock that down, trying to improve that security, right? Because, you know, yeah, I can make an IoT device very simply, right, and very easily. And security wasn't on the forefront. It is it's got to be now, right? So this year, if if the device doesn't have it, then we you know the network should, right?

Michel Nicolai:

Everyone's familiar with NPRO protection on their laptop, yeah. Because at the end point you need some kind of protection, but you cannot run a full suite on your IoT device, yeah? It's impossible.

Kevin Drinkall:

Well otherwise it doesn't become

Michel Nicolai:

But it is a network device, yeah.

Kevin Drinkall:

So I mean there are you can't use one type of protection. When we talk about cyber security from our sort of point of view, right, we're talking about the network security, uh, how it goes in and out of the network. Uh of course, you should use that in tandem with endpoint, right? That's just another another tool. Yeah. Uh, you know, and even on networking, there is just there's not one tool, right? There's several different things that you will need to to use. And actually, one of the things that we did very well, I think, last year, was bundle it all together into a single single license.

Hugh Simpson:

That just takes you know, simplicity, and that's kind of all over what we've been talking about, yeah, has been trying to simplify and make it easy, more efficient.

Kevin Drinkall:

Yeah, without losing that complex uh technology, right? So you still have that, you know, how can I say get under the bonnet and change all those functional settings, but let let this platform do it, and that's what uh leveraging for the cloud means. And I would say also one of the things, certainly from our point of view, when you look at Nebula as a platform, the only way to get the devices to talk to each other to work out what to do on a network is to work in the cloud. Lots of lots of companies can make a platform that just simply gives you access to the device or manage the basic settings. But when you start to get talk about, oh, I've got a security device and I need it to do something with the access point and I need it to understand the switching and I need it all that together to do something to control your network. That's not really possible without using or leveraging cloud, right?

Michel Nicolai:

So yeah, and even connecting to other platforms, we we can use APIs, yeah, to to bring those kind of information in our ecosystem.

Kevin Drinkall:

Yeah, which gives you access to things.

Michel Nicolai:

But that's only possible because we're in the cloud, yeah.

Kevin Drinkall:

Yeah, absolutely. And it gives you access to things like uh performance and you can even achieve SLAs and you know, all this traffic shaping and and even reporting becomes much easier to understand. If you're in a managed service provider, delivering uh information to your customer about what you've been up to and what you've been doing for them is also pretty crucial as well.

Michel Nicolai:

Yeah, yeah, and we have quite some good uh tools that we can inform people how to do this, yeah, on MSP level, but also on security level, on even on specific hardware, we can do that. So, and that is key, yeah, to to find out the real cause of the issue, then that kind of information is key, but in in a way that is understandable. So you can ask the AI if it's too complicated, can you simplify it, yeah, with uh these and these numbers in and that's what we we can offer with the cloud information that we have today.

Kevin Drinkall:

So, anyway, uh I think we're gonna stick to the four, right, this year.

Hugh Simpson:

So give us a reminder then, Kev. What were the four trends? So when we come to 2027 and we review this, what are they?

Kevin Drinkall:

So we uh I would say uh cloud-first networking by far will be a crucial point uh for for many companies to address or look into. They might not realize they're doing that today, but this will become the norm uh and it will keep continuing to grow. High performance networks is definitely always going to be a case next year. This year, it's always this year we'll see a significant shift to at least standardizing on 2.5 gig, right? So and I think Wi-Fi 7 will become the de facto for delivering that speed, density, reliability, and also being able to leverage some of those technologies like our MLO. Inside that, I think MSPs will start to look at how they you know how they manage their network more efficiently, and they're looking for tools, so they want less tool sprawl, and I think cloud will give them that as well, right? So network automation will become part of that that process. So network automation, I think, is what more and more customers are looking to do, and I think that's definitely going to be a trend. Those uh tools that we have, for example, will definitely be key for us, right, as we move forward. Uh, and I think so. Application awareness, uh, actually, I think knowing what's on your network will be very important for customers, and I think that you know the security, like I said, will become very key to that, you know, the box, right?

Hugh Simpson:

That sounds that sounds really great, actually, and I and really uh looking forward to this year, to be honest. Because I think you know, these are all realistic, they're all there, they're not you know, it's not pie in the sky, for instance. It's not uh I don't think so. And I think it's really just building on the you know the foundation that's already out there, right? And just seeing them come to fruition.

Michel Nicolai:

I think it's also for the reseller a big change, yeah, in how to run it traditionally, because all the resellers become more of an MSP, yeah, like doing the service for their customer through the cloud. So it's also a big change for the reseller, how to deal with their customer. I think that's a big impact for them as well. Wow to make that change.

Kevin Drinkall:

Yeah, and how to become more responsive, I would say. Exactly. Efficiently, because obviously, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, you know, scaling out and being more efficient has to come from using clouds.

Michel Nicolai:

And I think we with our nebula platform, we can help our reseller to make that transition, to make that easier, to become a good MSP for the future to help their their customers even better.

Kevin Drinkall:

Well, I think if you combine Nebula with the the technologies that's in the actual hardware, you know, from Wi-Fi, security, switching, and even, you know, all those components actually. Yeah, yeah, the reliability, you know, added into the response the times that you can achieve and the scalability by automating tasks when you add all those together, I think that that really makes it an efficient tool and fits a lot of what we are predicting as trends, right?

Hugh Simpson:

So yeah, absolutely.

Kevin Drinkall:

So, okay, well, uh, thank you all for listening and uh yeah, join us for our next one.

Michel Nicolai:

Yeah, thank you for listening and till next time.

Hugh Simpson:

Thank you.