T
he world loves Wi-Fi. Perhaps a bit too
much, with congested frequency bands
and routing chips struggling to keep up
with the amount of data we demand to
transfer through thin air. But how can we
ensure that we’re getting the best speeds and how can
Wi-Fi be improved for our expanding needs?
Obviously, the cool kids will have everything connected by
Ethernet, especially anything used for streaming 4K (and
nothing says ‘I love you’ more than a spouse consenting to
50m of CAT-6 being run beneath the stair carpet) but phones,
tablets, tiny IOT devices, and slim laptops frequently eschew
the network interface controller, and rely instead on Wi-Fi.
But Wi-Fi isn’t just Wi-Fi any more. It recently went through
some retrospective rebranding, so the standard we knew and
loved as 802.11n revels in the new name Wi-Fi 4 just in time to
become obsolete. The current standards you’ll find in new
routers, motherboards, and USB Wi-Fi adapters are Wi-Fi 5 (or
802.11ac to its mum) and the incoming Wi-Fi 6 (aka 802.11ax).
They’re all backwards compatible, so if you get a new router
you don’t need to worry about upgrading everything else.
What is it that sets Wi-Fi 6 apart, then? What, other than
the relentless march of technology, made it necessary when
Wi-Fis 4 and 5 do nicely for most people? Wireless
networking’s popularity is working against it, with the
frequency bands—especially the 2.4GHz spectrum shared by
your nan’s cordless phone, next door’s baby monitor,
Bluetooth, many RF switches and Wi-Fi. The 5GHz band is
filling up too, as Wi-Fi abandons 2.4GHz.
Wi-Fi 6 can theoretically use frequencies from 1GHz to
6GHz, although anything other than 2.4 and 5GHz has yet to
be approved for public use.
This is important because it means Wi-Fi is beginning to
take lessons from cellular data technology, 5G, and some of
the new tech in Wi-Fi 6 is very clever. It’s extending the
capability of Wi-Fi to carry ever more data, while making more
efficient use of the spectrum we’re using at the moment.
Maziar Nekovee, professor of telecoms and mobile
technologies at the University of Sussex, explains what’s going
on, “The 6GHz band is becoming available from the FCC [the
US government’s regulator of such things], and I think it has
about 1GHz bandwidth in total, so there is a lot of room to
extend capacity. 2.4GHz has only a small channel bandwidth,
20MHz, while 5GHz has more, so to have more capacity while
avoiding interference with existing services the new band is
being allocated and licensed.
“In that band you can operate at 120MHz bandwidth. As a
rule of thumb, if you’re just next to the Wi-Fi and you double
the bandwidth, then you can double the data rate.”
As many laptop users have noticed over the years,
however, as you move away from the Wi-Fi router speeds canCurrently looking
good to take the
Wi-Fi 7 name is
802.11be, a new
standard
currently being
worked on by the
Institute of
Electrical and
Electronic
Engineers. A
maximum speed
of 30Gbps has
been attached to
the new
standard, and
improvements
such as
coordinated
multiuser MIMO
(16 antennas)
and greater use
of multiple
access points
such as mesh
networks—
another way in
which Wi-Fi and
cellular data are
coming together.Lucky
seven?WIRELESS FUTURE
How new technologies are changing the humble router for the better
Bluetoooth, used to
pipe music to
expensive-looking
headphones, is just
one of the
technologies
cluttering up the
2.4GHz frequency.TECH
REPORT