Wi-Fi 6 Rolling out in 2019
Wi-Fi as we know it has come very long way since the introduction in 1999 of 802.11b and the founding of the Wi-Fi Alliance in 2000.
Wi-Fi is literally everywhere from the home, hospitals, hotels, airports, stadiums, you name it.
High traffic areas such as hospitals with hundreds of Wi-Fi mobile devices often have challenges to get beyond the noise, which can result in slower speeds, dropped packets, and potential connection loss.
While having all the speed is great you also need to have the efficiency and network capacity.
Welcome to Wi-Fi 6 or 802.11ax
First like the Wi-Fi Alliance has proven, 802.11ax is backwards compatible with 802.11a/b/g/n/ac.
– Network efficiency is improved by providing downlink and uplink by using 8×8 MU-MIMO, which simply allows more MU-MIMO clients to connect to the AP in a simultaneous fashion. This really benefits high bandwidth application requirements.
– 1024 quadrature amplitude modulation mode (1024 QAM) enables throughput increases by as much as 25 percent over Wi-Fi 5 or 802.11ac.
– Target wait time. This is somewhat similar to CAM (Continuous Aware Mode)and PSP (Power Saving Polling Mode) in mobile devices. It provides a better way to handle packets those increasing sleep time. Essentially, allows Wi-Fi devices to become more power efficient increasing battery time.
Comparing and contrasting 802.11ac to 802.11ax can be summed up as follows.
– Both have the same channel bandwidth in (MHz) of 20, 40, 80, 80+80, 160.
– While 802.11ac is only in 5GHz, 80211ax is in both 2.4GHz and 5GHz.
– Maximum data rate is increased from 3.5Gbps to 9.6Gbps
– Highest subcarrier modulation increases from 256-QAM to 1024-QAM
– Spatial streams increase from 4 to 8.
