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WiFi 6: What is it and how do I get it?

WiFi 6: What is it and how do I get it?

Posted on - 12.05.22

What is WiFi 6?

802.11ax is the next iteration of wireless standards after 802.11ac, the WiFi alliance has decided to choose a less confusing name and have called it WiFi 6, at the same time the previous standards also have new names.

  • 802.11ac is WiFi 5

  • 802.11n is WiFi 4

The latest standard was released in 2019 and has been adopted by most vendors and many client devices are now being shipped with WiFi 6 wireless chip sets to make the most of the new features and improved throughput.

WiFi 6 devices are operate in the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands and can deliver greater capacity that the previous WiFi 5 standards.

Advantages

Having a WiFi 6 network can improve battery life on your clients, which makes it ideal for IoT applications. This is facilitated through a feature called 'Target Wake time' (TWT) which allows routers/access points to schedule the sleep mode times of client devices.

Improved data speeds are attainable, potentially up to a 40% increase, through a more efficient data encoding method. Unlike WiFi 5, these improvements apply to both the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands.

Less congestion - Using MU-MIMO in WiFi 6 we can now get multiple client devices responding to an access point at the same time. In WiFi 5 (802.11ac) the access point could talk to many clients at the same time but the clients could not all respond at the same time.

Where can I get it?

At Utility Networks we are already stocking a number of different WiFi 6 Access Points to suit your needs.

If this email has piqued your interested in WiFi 6 and you want to learn a bit more, you could read through this PDF from the Wifi Alliance or take a look at the IEEE site (subscription required) for a more in-depth view.