HERE COMES WI-FI 6

NEW STANDARD GETS SENSIBLE NAME

THE NEXT ITERATION of the Wi-Fi standard is to be called Wi-Fi 6. Previous standards are known largely as 802.11, followed by letters, and it isn’t a logical progression. Wi-Fi 6 was known as 802.11ax before. The Wi-Fi Alliance has renamed a few others: 802.11ac is now Wi-Fi 5, and 802.11n is Wi-Fi 4. Wi-Fi 6 will bring a speed bump— prototypes reached 11Gbit/s, three times Wi-Fi 5, although real-world speeds are unlikely to reach such heights. It combines the 2.4 and 5GHz bands, and adds trickery such as Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access, and 1024 QAM encoding to increase efficiency. It’s also designed to cope with today’s crowded Wi-Fi environment, where dozens of devices battle over the same airways. The first access points are being put in place now, with the main event, and certified hardware, due next year.