Wi-Fi 6, also known as 802.11ax, is the latest Wi-Fi industry standard after Wi-Fi 5 (802.11ac). Before the release of Wi-Fi 6, Wi-Fi standards were identified by versions from 802.11b to 802.11ac. Later, the Wi-Fi Alliance decided to make the Wi-Fi standards easier to understand and remember, and therefore renamed them in a manner similar to the different generations like 3G, 4G, and 5G in mobile communications.
Wi-Fi 6 introduces various new technologies, such as orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA), uplink/downlink multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (UL/DL MU-MIMO), BSS coloring, and Target Wake Time, significantly improving performance. In this manner, Wi-Fi 6 supports four times higher bandwidth and concurrency than Wi-Fi 5. Additionally, Wi-Fi 6 provides lower latency and better energy-saving capability than Wi-Fi 5.
What Problems Does Wi-Fi 6 Try to Solve?
Wi-Fi 6 is designed for high-density wireless access and high-capacity wireless services, such as in outdoor large-scale public venues, high-density stadiums, indoor high-density wireless offices, and electronic classrooms (e-classrooms).
In these scenarios, the number of STAs on the Wi-Fi network increases sharply within a short time. Furthermore, growing voice and video traffic also poses a requirement on network adjustment. Some services are sensitive to bandwidth and latency. For example, 4K video streams demand per-user bandwidth of 50 Mbit/s, voice streams necessitate latency of less than 30 ms, and VR streams require per-user bandwidth of 75 Mbit/s and latency of less than 15 ms. If long transmission latency is caused by network congestion or retransmission, user experience will greatly deteriorate.
Althrough Wi-Fi 5 (802.11ac) delivers high bandwidth, the ever-increasing access density causes a bottleneck in its throughput performance. Wi-Fi 6 introduces technologies such as OFDMA and UL/DL MU-MIMO. As such, Wi-Fi 6 achieves a four-fold increase in the bandwidth, speed, and user concurrency, while providing lower latency. For example, when there are more than 100 students in an e-classroom, a Wi-Fi 5 network may be faced with great challenges in video transmission and uplink/downlink interaction, but this will no longer be a problem in Wi-Fi 6.
Wi-Fi 6 vs Wi-Fi 5
Compared with Wi-Fi 5, Wi-Fi 6 stands out not only in the faster speed but also in user performance improvement in high-density scenarios.
WiFi 6 vs WiFi 5
For more information, see Wi-Fi 6.
