EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT WI-FI 6
Wi-Fi 6 is here and promises big things for our wireless networks. Matt Hanson shares what to expect.
Wi-Fi 6 is here and promises big things for our wireless networks. Matt Hanson shares what to expect
Wi-Fi 6 is probably the most exciting thing to happen to your wireless network in 2019. You’ll probably start to hear the term increasingly bandied about by router makers and ISPs as we approach its launch, but what exactly is Wi-Fi 6, and how can it benefit you? Here, we take a close look at what Wi-Fi 6 promises and explain the impact it can make to home networks. We’ll tell you everything you need to know about the standard, including how to upgrade your network to get the most out of the new tech.
You may have already come across Wi-Fi 6’s previous name: 802.11ax. Thankfully, the Wi-Fi Alliance, a non-profit organisation that ensures Wi-Fi products meet certain standards, acknowledged that the former naming conventions were far too convoluted. As Edgar Figueroa, president and CEO of the Wi-Fi Alliance, explained: “For nearly two decades, Wi-Fi users have had to sort through technical naming conventions to determine if their devices support the latest Wi-Fi. The Wi-Fi Alliance is excited to introduce Wi-Fi 6, and present a new naming scheme to help industry and Wi-Fi users easily understand the Wi-Fi generation supported by their device or connection.”
“Wi-Fi 6” is certainly going to be a lot easier to remember than “802.11ax,” which supersedes 802.11ac (now known as Wi-Fi 5). It brings the naming convention more in line with 3G, 4G, and 5G. Going from Wi-Fi 5 to Wi-Fi 6 is a clear upgrade – whereas it’s not clear whether 802.11ax is newer or older than 802.11ac. We’re certainly glad of this new naming convention.
If your current router is only a few years old, it’s likely to be a Wi-Fi 5 model. While Wi-Fi 6 is backward compatible with older devices, you’ll need a Wi-Fi 6 router to benefit from the full potential of the new technology.
WHEN’S IT COMING OUT?
Earlier this year, a Wi-Fi 6 certification program was announced for devices to support the new standard, stating that products need to offer several features and meet certain criteria to be Wi-Fi 6 certified, with the program starting in the third quarter of 2019 – and it’s underway right now.
In fact, Wi-Fi 6 capable devices were on display as early as the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas in January of this year, and you might have noticed that some Wi-Fi 6 routers have already gone on sale – including the Netgear Nighthawk AX8 and AX4, TP-Link’s Archer AX6000, and the Asus RT-AX88U. These early devices generally still have the 802.11ax labeling, though.
Does that mean you can go out and buy a Wi-Fi 6 router today? Well, not quite. These early routers are based on the draft standard of Wi-Fi 6, which at the time of their release has not been finalised. If certain aspects of the certification change, then these early routers may miss out on features that other Wi-Fi 6-certified devices boast. As always with early adopters, it’s a risk you’ll have to take if you want the new technology as soon as possible.
WHAT DO I NEED FOR WI-FI 6?
Of course, having a Wi-Fi 6-capable router is only the first step toward benefitting from the new technology. While your older Wi-Fi products will be able to connect to a Wi-Fi 6 router, to get the features of Wi-Fi 6 (which we’ll get to in a moment), you’ll also need Wi-Fi 6-certified devices. And at the moment, those are rather thin on the ground.
The good news, though, is that we should start seeing a steady stream of Wi-Fi 6-enabled devices hitting the market. Most flagship smartphones will feature the technology – for example, the Samsung Galaxy S10 is the first smartphone with Wi-Fi 6 built in. At the moment, Wi-Fi 6 could be confined to the more expensive handsets, but hopefully that will quickly change as Wi-Fi 6 adoption grows.
We should also see numerous Wi-Fi 6 laptops coming to the market in the near future, with major manufacturers announcing Wi-Fi 6-equipped notebooks back at CES.
WI-FI 6 SPEEDS
Wi-Fi 6, like other leaps in Wi-Fi technology, brings improvements to both the speed and coverage of wireless networks, but what kind of speeds should we expect from Wi-Fi 6? Early figures suggest that we could see speed boosts of around 30 percent over Wi-Fi 5.
That’s a pretty decent improvement, and Wi-Fi 6 should theoretically offer speeds of up to 10Gb/s. While that’s still not enough to challenge wired networks, you could see a decent jump in speeds if you’re upgrading from Wi-Fi 5.
Wi-Fi 6 will achieve these speeds by fully utilising the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands at the same time. By combining the bands, rather than keeping them separate, as in previous Wi-Fi generations, and using MU-MIMO to increase the capacity of the network, Wi-Fi 6 could be a seriously tempting upgrade for anyone who’s frustrated with the sluggish performance of their Wi-Fi network. The improved
MU-MIMO (multi-user, multiple input, multiple output) features of Wi-Fi 6 will allow eight users on both up and downlink (Wi-Fi 5 only allows four users at once on the downstream). However, there are rumors that this feature may not be present at launch – another reason why early adopters might be wiser to wait until Wi-Fi 6 is more established.
Wi-Fi 6 will also eventually make use of the 1GHz and 6GHz bands when they become available, and the widening of the spectrum will allow for more bandwidth, which can then be split into sub-channels, smartly routing connections between devices for better speeds.
Because of this, people who use Wi-Fi 6 in congested environments – for example, households with lots of different Wi-Fi-enabled devices all vying for an Internet connection – will likely see the biggest leap in performance.
With the number of smart devices in our homes (which require an internet connection) constantly increasing, Wi-Fi
“Most flagship smartphones will feature the technology
– for example, the Samsung Galaxy S10 is the first smartphone with Wi-Fi 6 built in. ”
6 could be a real game changer – quite literally, if you have a house full of Fortnite addicts.
It’s not just in your home that Wi-Fi 6 can help with congestion, however. If you live in a street or apartment complex with a lot of competing wireless networks, some of the clever technology introduced with Wi-Fi 6 can help reduce conflicts with your neighbors’ wireless networks.
One such technology is BSS (Base Service Station) Color. This identifies and marks frames from neighboring networks that don’t originate from your household, allowing your router to effectively ignore them. It’s a rather elegant way of ensuring that signals from nearby networks don’t interfere with each other.
BANDS ON THE RUN
The fact that Wi-Fi 6 should in the future make use of additional bands alongside 2.4GHz and 5GHz is big news. For what seems like ages, many routers have been providing those two bands. The problem is, 2.4GHz has long been overcrowded with consumer electronics, as so many older or budget devices use that band. Meanwhile, 5GHz isn’t just getting more crowded as more devices are released that use that band, but its spectrum is too limited to support wider bandwidth channels. Not only that, but parts of the 5GHz spectrum are still restricted in how they are used.
This has lead to many manufacturers pushing to expand the number of bands available for Wi-Fi devices, with a proposal by some of the biggest names in networking suggesting that the 6GHz band would be “essential to meeting demand for the next generation of wireless broadband services.” Fans of wordy, overly technical documents can read the entire proposal at http://bit.
ly/6GHzProposal. The bottom line is that Wi-Fi networks need more space. If you think of networks as roads, the more data (vehicles) there is, the more congested they become. Adding additional bands would be similar to opening up more lanes on a highway, to allow traffic to pass more easily.
It looks as though, with Wi-Fi 6, those demands for more bands will be met. This could be one of the most important changes the new technology ushers in – particularly because of our increasingly congested wireless networks. So, while there will be an improvement in speeds with Wi-Fi 6, it seems as though the bigger focus with the new technology is making sure that Wi-Fi networks have enough capacity to support the demands of modern connected homes, where every smart device needs a fast and stable internet connection.
Plus, with home broadband speeds getting ever faster (for those of us lucky enough to live in areas with decent infrastructure, at least), there’s an added pressure to ensure that our Wi-Fi networks don’t become bottlenecks for ultra-fast fiber broadband.
EXPANDING COVERAGE
Another key advantage of Wi-Fi 6 will be expanding the coverage of Wi-Fi networks. For anyone who’s had to put up with a wireless network that struggles to reach certain parts of the home, this will be good news.
One way that Wi-Fi 6 is improving coverage is with beamforming. While Wi-Fi 5 also boasted beamforming functionality, it could only support four antennas, while Wi-Fi 6 can support eight. Beamforming essentially directs Wi-Fi signals toward specific devices in various places, ensuring that those devices get the best possible connection to the wireless network. This is particularly important for devices that move around a lot – such as smartphones and tablets, which are carried around your home.
Wi-Fi 6 can also offer wider coverage (and greater stability) thanks to its longer OFDM symbol. Now, this gets a bit technical, but OFDM is a way of transmitting data by dividing it among smaller sub-carriers. With Wi-Fi 6, the OFDM symbol is four times longer, which means there are four times as many sub-carriers, increasing both coverage and speed. To cut a long story short (and skip over a lot of jargon), it should mean that a Wi-Fi 6 network will reach Wi-Fi 6 devices over a much wider area, such as multiple floors in a house, while remaining fast and stable.
Wi-Fi 6 is also more efficient thanks to OFDMA (Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiple Access), which is brand new for Wi-Fi 6, although the technology has been used in 4G LTE networks. Essentially a multi-user version of OFDM, it allows up to 30 clients to share a channel (rather than waiting for the channel to become available), and can combine different types of network traffic. Router maker TP-Link explains the technology by comparing Wi-Fi connections to a series of delivery trucks that deliver data packets to your devices. In previous versions of Wi-Fi, these delivery trucks could only deliver one parcel to one device at a time. However, with Wi-Fi 6 and OFDMA, each truck can deliver multiple parcels to multiple devices simultaneously. In the real world, this would certainly speed up Amazon deliveries, but in the case of Wi-Fi 6, it leads to more efficient data delivery, and could help boost the speeds of uploads and downloads.
BETTER BATTERY LIFE
You might not realise it, but how your device connects to Wi-Fi networks can be one of the biggest drains on its battery life, and with Wi-Fi 6, the Target Wake Time (TWT) feature makes this more efficient. It helps control when mobile devices wake up to send and receive wireless data, and by better managing this, those mobile devices can remain in their sleep state for longer. This, in turn, leads to noticeably longer battery lives for your mobile devices.
This technology will also benefit low-powered Internet of Things (IoT) devices. With our homes becoming ever more packed with this kind of smart gadget, this is good news.
SHOULD YOU BE EXCITED?
For many people, Wi-Fi is something that’s always there and, most of the time, just works, so it can be difficult to get excited about it. However, there are some scenarios where Wi-Fi 6 can really make a difference. If you live or work in an area with a lot of competing wireless networks, or your home is full of devices (and people) all hammering the Internet, Wi-Fi 6’s increased speeds and bandwidths can be a real bonus. Plus, as our homes become ever more connected with an increasing number of smart devices, while we also demand more from our networks and internet connections, thanks to 4K streaming (and upcoming game streaming services such as Google Stadia will add to that strain), Wi-Fi 6 will seem ever more essential.