Each of these subchannels can carry data intended for a different device. Wi-Fi 6 can now divide a wireless channel into a large number of subchannels. But here’s what’s going on under the hood: A Wi-Fi 6 access point with a Wi-Fi 6 device will work better. You don’t really need to know the details. How Wi-Fi 6 Battles Congestion Qualcomm touts various features that make up “11ax,” now Wi-Fi 6. It could apply to you at home if you have a lot of devices connected to Wi-Fi, or if you live in a dense apartment complex. This wouldn’t just apply to busy public places. Intel trumpets that Wi-Fi 6 will improve each user’s average speed by “at least four times” in congested areas with a lot of connected devices. The new Wi-Fi 6, also known as 802.11ax, incorporates many new technologies to help with this. You’re probably going to have slow Wi-Fi. Picture a busy stadium, airport, hotel, mall, or even a crowded office with everyone connected to Wi-Fi. Wi-Fi tends to get bogged down when you’re in a crowded place with a lot of Wi-FI enabled devices. This will also help with low-power “ Internet of Things” devices that connect via Wi-Fi. This will conserve power, as it means the Wi-Fi radio can spend more time in sleep mode. When the access point is talking to a device (like your smartphone), it can tell the device exactly when to put its Wi-Fi radio to sleep and exactly when to wake it up to receive the next transmission. Longer Battery LifeĪ new “target wake time” (TWT) feature means your smartphone, laptop, and other Wi-Fi-enabled devices should have longer battery life, too.
And there shouldn’t be as much interference for 2.4GHz as old cordless telephones and wireless baby monitors are retired. While the industry has shifted to 5GHz Wi-Fi for less interference, 2.4GHz is still better at penetrating solid objects. This new standard even increases speeds on 2.4GHz networks. The chips that encode and decode these signals keep getting more powerful and can handle the extra work. Mainly, more data is packed into the same radio waves. Wi-Fi 6 accomplishes this through more efficient data encoding, resulting in higher throughput.
If you’re using a Wi-Fi router with a single device, maximum potential speeds should be up to 40% higher with Wi-Fi 6 compared to Wi-Fi 5. Wi-Fi 3 would have been 802.11g, released in 2003.Īs usual, the latest Wi-Fi standard offers faster data transfer speeds.Wi-Fi 2 would have been 802.11a, also released in 1999.Wi-Fi 1 would have been 802.11b, released in 1999.But, if they were, here’s what they’d be called:
Older versions of Wi-Fi aren’t widely in use and aren’t officially being branded. You may be seeing Wi-Fi numbers on your phone, tablet, or laptop soon.
The Wi-Fi Alliance also announced would like to see these numbers appear in software so you can tell which Wi-Fi network is newer and faster while connecting on your smartphone, tablet, or laptop.