WiFi 6 technology has been available for some time, but it was not until now that they just presented their official certification. WiFi 6 is already a reality.
If you spend a lot of time connecting to the Internet this is really great news, because this new generation of Wi-Fi promises to be faster, more consistent and better than the wireless technology we use today.
Although the origins of Wi-fi date back to the 1980s it has had a lot of improvements, but most have been small updates. However Wi-Fi 6, also known as IEEE 802.11ax , is much more than that.
Like its most important predecessors (802.11b, 802.11a, 802.11g, 802.11n and 802.11ac), 802.11ax represents a generational turning point for the technology – a milestone that device manufacturers will support in the coming years in new phones. smart phones, tablets, computers, routers , home automation devices …
Because the names of these various 802.11 standards have always been uncommercial, last year the Wi-Fi Alliance , the trade organization that oversees and certifies Wi-Fi technology, announced a new naming structure.
From now on, the previous standard, 802.11n, would be known as Wi-Fi 4; the current standard, 802.11ac, would be called Wi-Fi 5; and the next-generation standard, 802.11ax, which has just been made official, is Wi-Fi 6.
What’s so special about Wi-Fi 6?
It will be up to four times faster than current Wi-Fi: As usual, when switching to Wi-Fi 6 from Wi-Fi 5, we will see a significant increase in data speeds, with a theoretical download speed of up to 9, 6 Gbps (gigabits per second) compared to Wi-Fi 5’s 6.9 Gbps. Of course, those are the theoretical maximums you’d never see in real-world use, but the speed improvements of 802.11 nonetheless. ax should be very noticeable.
More Devices: Will provide capacity for more devices, with technologies including Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA) and Multiple Input Multiple Output (MU-MIMO) for multiple users, providing up to four times more wireless connection devices on a single network.
Customize the network: The new connections will allow users to personalize the use of the networks to detect the most efficient connection, for example.
When will it be available?
With Wi-Fi 6 certification now officially available to product manufacturers, it is clear that we won’t have long to wait.
Devices like the Samsung Galaxy Note 10 and Apple’s iPhone 11 support Wi-Fi 6, as does the upcoming Google Pixel 4, along with new laptops, tablets, and other devices to be released in the near future.
However, to enjoy any of the benefits of Wi-Fi 6, we will also need a Wi-Fi router that supports 802.11ax , which will soon become the standard technology in all but budget models (albeit with the passing time, these too).
In reality, this means that it will be months or years before the benefits of this new technology are widely available and can be enjoyed by most of us. However, when we do, the internet will be noticeably faster (depending on the limits of our home internet connection, of course), and it will be easier to run more devices more securely.
This is all? Well, with the departure of Wi-Fi 6, it also means that Wi-Fi 7 is on the way and is expected to be available in 2024 or so. By then, many more surprises, at a technological level, await us.
