The Wi-Fi Alliance announces the official launch of the Wi-Fi 6 certification program. Wi-Fi 6 offers new features and needs to offer enhanced range and higher speeds. Wi-Fi 6 certified devices meet the requirements of the alliance.
The announcement marks the official start of the certification of Wi-Fi 6 devices but in fact it is a formal step because devices with support for the WiFi standard already appeared. This year, even more Wi-Fi 6-enabled devices will be released gradually. Samsung’s Galaxy Note 10 and Note 10+ are the first smartphones that, for example, are Wi-Fi Certified 6. In addition, several manufacturers advertise with Wi-Fi 6 support. For example, during the recent iPhone keynote, Apple stated that the iPhone 11 and iPhone 11 Pro models are compatible with Wi-Fi 6, and several Wi-Fi 6 routers have already appeared.
Wi-Fi 6 works via 802.11ax radios. These new radios are the sixth generation of 802.11, so the Wi-Fi Alliance is calling it the new standard Wi-Fi 6, as demonstrated by the new Wi-Fi naming scheme last year. According to the alliance’s estimates, Wi-Fi 6 is about 30 percent faster than Wi-Fi 5. The first manufacturers of 802.11ax routers claim a total maximum theoretical bandwidth of 11Gbit/s, but in practice this bandwidth will be a lot lower.
Wi-Fi 6 uses orthogonal frequency division multiple access, also called orfdma. This technique takes a wifi channel and divides it into multiple, smaller signals. These signals are called resource units, or ru’s. These ru’s allow a router to communicate with multiple devices at the same time, by assigning a resource unit to each device.
This allows multiple small data packets to be handled simultaneously, eliminating the need for users to wait for each other. A large part of the data traffic on a network consists of small packets, which means that either the fdma has to result in a much lower network latency. In addition, ru’s offer a flexible bandwidth. For example, a device that streams 4k video is allocated more bandwidth than a phone that only uses the Twitter app.
