The Next Wi-Fi Version Will Be Wi-Fi 6
Ever since Wi-Fi technology was introduced, it’s been known principally as 802.11x, where the “x” stands for one or more letters. First, we had 802.11b, followed by 802.11a — yes, you read that right — which begat 802.11g, which begat 802.11n, which begat 802.11ad, unless of course you consider 802.11ac to be the more appropriate successor, which it practically is based on market uptake and… gosh, this has gotten a tad confusing. We haven’t even touched on 802.11af, which clearly ought to be considered the foul-mouthed black sheep of the family. Fortunately, someone noticed.
The Wi-Fi Alliance has announced that the upcoming version of Wi-Fi (802.11ax) will be henceforth known as… Wi-Fi 6. 802.11ac will be called Wi-Fi 5, while 802.11n networking capabilities will be defined as Wi-Fi 4. It’s not the sexiest branding known to man, but it’s a much more straightforward method of determining which standard your hardware supports than we’ve had of late and far more intuitive than the alphabet soup we’ve collectively used for the past 18 years or so.
“For nearly two decades, Wi-Fi users have had to sort through technical naming conventions to determine if their devices support the latest Wi-Fi,” said Edgar Figueroa, president and CEO of Wi-Fi Alliance. “Wi-Fi Alliance is excited to introduce Wi-Fi 6, and present a new naming scheme to help industry and Wi-Fi users easily understand the Wi-Fi generation supported by their device or connection.”
This new naming will be carried forward into UI support, assuming software devs take advantage of the capability. Instead of seeing the curved lines of a Wi-Fi connection logo, software developers can actually incorporate a “4”, “5”, or “6” into the logo directly, like so:
This should make it easier to determine at a glance how quick your connection to a hotspot is and make it easier for the less technically oriented to understand available speeds. The Standard Formerly Known as 802.11ax is designed to operate in the existing 2.4GHz and 5GHz frequency bands, but introduces features like OFDMA (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access) and 1024-QAM modulation to improve overall spectrum utilization. While actual data bandwidth is only nominally higher with 802.11ax, real-world performance is expected to improve by up to 4x thanks to more efficient spectrum utilization.
The new standard is expected to be released in 2019. Prototype devices have already hit speeds of up to 11Gbit/s in trade show demos. Real-world user performance will only be a fraction of that, but the expected benefits to spectrum efficiency should pay dividends in the heavy usage environments that tend to play havoc with Wi-Fi connectivity today.
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