On October 1, 2026, John Ousterhout, Stanford professor emeritus, made the case for Homa, a message-based transport protocol whose p99 latency on short messages drops to 92 microseconds against 1.2 milliseconds for TCP over a 100 Gbps link. Evaluate it on the datacenter links where every millisecond idles a GPU, but price the adoption cost before replacing anything.

Wi-Fi 8 (IEEE 802.11bn) is the first wireless generation that no longer tries to break a throughput record: with the same theoretical top speed as Wi-Fi 7, it targets bounded latency and “ultra-high reliability” in dense environments. The first Qualcomm and Broadcom products land in late 2026, but most users can ignore them until 2028.

AWS announced general availability of a Las Vegas Local Zone (us-west-2-las-2a) on August 20, 2026, with EC2 C7i/M7i/R7i/C8gn, ECS, EKS, the Application Load Balancer, and Direct Connect. Teams under latency or data-residency pressure should weigh it against a full region before committing.