The Wi-Fi Alliance today announced the official launch of the Wi-Fi Certified 6 certification program, and with it the promise of higher wireless speeds, reduced latency, improved battery life, and less network congestion. Of course, you'll need to buy new gear in order to take full advantage.
Wi-Fi 6 will also be referred to as 802.11ax and is the successor to Wi-Fi 5, boasting four-times the capacity of its predecessor. That's not only good news for home users, but public venues where wireless is offered, be that a coffee shop right through to an airport passenger lounge.
Edgar Figueroa, president and CEO, Wi-Fi Alliance, explains, "Wi-Fi CERTIFIED 6 is ushering in a new era of Wi-Fi, building on Wi-Fi's core characteristics to provide better performance in every environment for users, greater network capacity for service providers to improve coverage for their customers, and new opportunities for advanced applications ... Wi-Fi CERTIFIED 6 will deliver improvements in connectivity, including in high density locations and IoT environments."
The advanced capabilities Wi-Fi 6 offers are thanks to a range of new technologies incorporated into the standard, including Orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA), which shares channels for increased network efficiency and lower latency, Multi-user multiple input multiple output (MU-MIMO), allowing more devices to be connected and more data to be transferred at once, 160MHz channels allow for greater bandwidth, Target wake time (TWT) will improve battery life for connected devices (especially IoT devices), Transmit beamforming increases data rates at any range, and 1024 quadrature amplitude modulation mode (1024-QAM) increases Wi-Fi device throughput, meaning more data can be encoded in the same amount of spectrum.
Wi-Fi 6-compatible hardware has been available for a few months now, meaning if you've purchased a new router recently there's a chance you're already enjoying 802.11ax performance. Of course, you also need to own devices that can take full advantage of Wi-Fi 6, and a very popular range of smartphones launching this week will. The iPhone 11 and iPhone 11 Pro are both Wi-Fi 6 compatible.