Wi-Fi 6 forces basic network equipment to upgrade

Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax) is here, and more and more wireless manufacturers have begun to launch consumer-grade routers and enterprise-grade access points (APs) that support Wi-Fi 6. Even Samsung has unveiled the Galaxy S10 series of mobile phones that support Wi-Fi 6. However, with the accelerated arrival of Wi-Fi 6 terminals, basic network equipment such as traditional switches that have been working silently in enterprise networks have become a bottleneck limiting the performance of Wi-Fi 6 and must be upgraded.

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The underlying equipment must keep up

The deployment of Wi-Fi 6 has become a trend, but enterprises should also have strong underlying wired network facilities to provide support when upgrading wireless APs.

Therefore, the upgrade of the underlying network equipment for Wi-Fi 6 needs to keep up. The reason is that although high-performance APs are important, the full value of APs cannot be realized without an underlying network that meets the requirements. Therefore, the underlying network equipment needs to provide fast enough speeds: from APs, uplinks to aggregation and core switches, and then to the cloud or data center.

Multi-gigabit switches to match

Starting from the user device, the first step of the wired network is the connection from the AP to the switch. In the past 5 to 10 years, most enterprise-class switches have 1Gbps Gigabit access ports to support Wi-Fi 4 (802.11n) and lower standard APs. At that time, Wi-Fi 4 APs were generally below 450Mbps, so they could be connected to the 1Gbps port of the switch.

But in the Wi-Fi 6 era, its throughput is even four times higher than that of Wi-Fi 5. In the test, the throughput of Wi-Fi 5 Wave 2 AP is 1.5Gbps per second, and the traditional 1Gbps port has obviously become a bottleneck. At this time, multi-gigabit (2.5Gbps/5Gbps/10Gbps) switch devices are needed to provide port support for Wi-Fi 6 AP.

The 10-billion-dollar market is beckoning

According to IDC statistics, the annual revenue of Ethernet switch market reached 28.1 billion US dollars in 2018, a year-on-year increase of 9.1%. Among them, 10Gbps Ethernet switches accounted for 30.6% of the annual revenue in 2018. However, given the price pressure brought by 10G ports at this stage, multi-gigabit switches naturally become a good choice for smooth upgrade of enterprise networks.

To take full advantage of the speed advantages provided by Wi-Fi 6 APs (up to 5Gbps per second), enterprises should be prepared to transition to multi-gigabit switches. Since the average lifespan of a switch is 5-7 years, and the average lifespan of switches in many educational institutions is up to 10 years, enterprises will definitely need multi-gigabit connectivity services during this period.

Let’s review the four major advantages and upgrades of Wi-Fi 6:

1. Upgrade brings full MU-MIMO

Multi-User MIMO (MU-MIMO) has been enhanced in Wi-Fi 6. Unlike Wi-Fi 5 (802.11ac), which only uses downlink MU-MIMO, Wi-Fi 6 also has uplink MU-MIMO features, which enables full multi-terminal parallel transmission. Therefore, a Wi-Fi 6 AP that supports 8x8 architecture can interact with 8 clients at a time.

2. Upgrade and introduce OFDMA technology

Wi-Fi 6 introduces OFDMA technology used by 4G LTE. This technology allows the AP to divide a channel into several blocks for simultaneous use, allowing data to be transmitted to multiple terminals in parallel. Once OFDMA technology is implemented, more than 30 terminals can receive data at the same time and then transmit the data back to the network at the same time.

3. High-order modulation coding speeds up

Wi-Fi 6 uses a higher-order modulation and coding scheme, 1024QAM, which can support each OFDM identifier to carry more data. After algorithm optimization, the transmission rate in multi-user concurrent scenarios can be increased by about 4 times.

4. BSS coloring mechanism innovation

Wi-Fi 6 also supports the BSS coloring mechanism. Since the number of channels that wireless APs can operate is limited, when multiple APs are close to each other and are located on the same channel, mutual interference is inevitable. However, the use of the BSS coloring mechanism allows the network to assign a "color" mark to the channel and reduce the interference threshold.

Conclusion

In the 20 years of rapid development of the Wi-Fi industry, it has created an economic value of 2 trillion US dollars. With the advent of the Wi-Fi 6 era, simply replacing some wireless APs is obviously not enough to guarantee a high-quality user experience. At this time, the importance of the underlying network, such as switches, becomes prominent and becomes the key to delivering on the promise of Wi-Fi 6's superior performance.