Wi-Fi 6 certification 802.11ax

The future of the WiFi is here. All hail Wi-Fi 6!

The Wi-Fi Alliance has formally launched product certification based on the IEEE 802.11ax standard, which the alliance last year decided to call Wi-Fi 6. And soon it will be here. In the third quarter of 2019, will provide capacity, coverage, and performance required by users to experience next generation Wi-Fi^® use cases, from streaming ultra high-definition (Ultra HD) movies to mission critical business applications.

Certification provides assurance of standard compliance and therefore vendor interoperability.

Probably the detail consumers will notice most of all is that as devices like smartphones begin shipping with Wi-Fi 6 certification, the signal strength icon will also show whether they’re connected to 802.11n (now Wi-Fi 4), 802.11ac (Wi-Fi 5) or 802.11ax (Wi-Fi 6), as shown in the image below.

Advanced capabilities

WLAN 802.11ax standard offers 10 Gbps speeds – up to 40% faster than 802.11ac.

Supported by Wi-Fi CERTIFIED 6 bring innovation for Wi-Fi to excel even in diverse Wi-Fi environments with many devices. Key benefits include higher data rates, increased network capacity, improved performance in congested environments, and improved power efficiency. These capabilities include:

• Uplink and downlink orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA): increases network efficiency and lowers latency for high demand environments
• Multi-user multiple input multiple output (MU-MIMO): allows more data to be transferred at once and enables an access point to transmit to a larger number of concurrent clients at once
• Transmit beamforming: enables higher data rates at a given range resulting in greater network capacity
• 1024 quadrature amplitude modulation mode (1024-QAM): increases throughput in Wi-Fi devices by encoding more data in the same amount of spectrum
• Target wake time (TWT): significantly improves battery life in Wi-Fi devices, such as Internet of Things (IoT) devices