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 – which is
pretty much 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
old 802.11ax labelling, 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 utilizing 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 rumours 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 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 neighbours’ wireless networks.
One such technology is BSS (Base Service Station) Colour.
This identifies and marks frames from neighbouring 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 orAsus has already launched a number of Wi-Fi 6 routers.Look for the logo on Wi-Fi 6-certified hardware. The Wi-Fi Alliance has simplified Wi-Fi naming conventions, with logos for Wi-Fis 4, 5 and 6.
50 |^ |^ December 2019