Wi-Fi 6 Development Status and Future Application Trends

Connections are given more profound value in the digital age. For consumers and organizations, the need for digital participation is ubiquitous, and reliable and powerful connections are the foundation of digital applications. Therefore, future connections will help companies reform operational processes, promote real-time decision-making, create new digital services, and provide seamless experiences for customers, partners, and employees. At the same time, the development of access technology will accelerate the digital connection between people, objects, and processes. These connections serve as the basis for data, enabling data to be perceived, transmitted, and calculated.

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In the imagination of future connections, people tend to pay more attention to 5G in various advertisements, but do not know much about the advantages of Wi-Fi 6. This article combines the views of the guests in the "Wi-Fi 6 Era - Current Development and Future Trends of Wireless LAN" webinar held by H3C to explain the current development status and future trends of Wi-Fi 6.

2020: The first year of Wi-Fi 6 development

As the next generation of Wi-Fi, Wi-Fi 6 will not only provide higher speed and greater capacity, lower latency and more refined traffic management, but will also have higher spectrum efficiency, larger coverage, more energy-efficient access terminal power consumption requirements, higher reliability and security, and access capabilities for traffic-consuming and latency-sensitive applications. It will greatly expand the application scope and scenarios of Wi-Fi networks, from enterprise office networks to enterprise production networks.

IDC's "China WLAN Market Quarterly Tracking Report, Q3 2019" report shows that the overall size of the WLAN market reached US$230 million in the third quarter of 2019, showing a steady upward trend. IDC predicts that in 2020, Wi-Fi 6 will shine in the wireless market, with the size of the Chinese market alone approaching US$200 million.

Wi-Fi 6 has a promising future

In the future digital construction, Wi-Fi will still have long-term vitality. Under the trend of cloud management, AI innovative operation and maintenance, and the integration of the Internet of Things, it is constantly realizing technological evolution and product updates. The value that Wi-Fi 6 brings to enterprises is concentrated in extensive connectivity, ultimate experience, improved efficiency, optimized processes, and innovative business.

Simply put, compared with the cost of 5G, Wi-Fi 6 can also be regarded as a good complement to 5G, which not only saves costs but also helps enterprises achieve a high level of performance. In the era of new infrastructure, the challenge of connection begins with the business needs of actual scenarios, such as the demand for extreme speed brought by the intelligent era, the demand for ultra-low latency in emerging fields such as autonomous driving, the demand for massive connections, the demand for business integration, and so on.

5G and Wi-Fi 6 technologies complement each other. They not only have the characteristics of extreme speed and ultra-low latency, but also have extremely low construction costs (in high-density scenarios, the construction cost of a single-point Wi-Fi 6 is 10,000 yuan, which can provide high-quality services to 100 users at a cost of 100 yuan per household), more refined scenario-based and business enabling capabilities, and have an extremely short construction period (ranging from 1 day to 7 days).

Introduction to Wi-Fi 6 Application Scenarios

The Wi-Fi 6+5G+IoT converged solution has flexible capacity expansion, unified management, and unified data value, which can effectively reduce user management costs, break down barriers between different types of data, realize data linkage, and lay a solid foundation for business enablement. H3C believes that the value of this technology will be reflected in the following scenarios:

Education scenarios: (1) The ultimate experience of Wi-Fi 6 can make online teaching and cloud classrooms a trend, subvert the traditional teaching model and improve the teaching quality; (2) The integration of Wi-Fi 6 and IoT can effectively analyze students' behavior habits and provide auxiliary decision-making for academic management; (3) Smart copying and RFID protocol asset management based on Lora IoT protocol can improve the school's related business level;

Medical scenarios: (1) The extreme speed of Wi-Fi 6 meets the high-bandwidth transmission requirements of medical images such as PACS, providing necessary guarantees for efficient analysis of pathology; (2) The extreme roaming of Wi-Fi 6 meets the roaming requirements of mobile medical services, providing a foundation for refined and digital medical care; (3) Smart infusion and intelligent temperature collection help liberate the productivity of medical staff and make great efforts to further realize the desire to save lives and heal the wounded in medical scenarios;

Enterprise scenarios: (1) Intelligent connectivity makes remote work a normal practice, reducing the cost of renting office space for enterprises; (2) Wi-Fi 6's ultra-low latency ensures video conferencing and improves enterprise office efficiency; (3) Smart buildings based on the LoRa/Zigbee IoT protocol enable more refined energy management and control, reducing enterprise energy costs.