The 6th generation of Wi-Fi technology is here! Speed ​​​​upgrade

While we are still struggling to decide whether to replace the old wireless routers at home, wireless technology is evolving at an accelerated pace. Driven by upstream companies such as Qualcomm, Broadcom, and Quantenna, wireless chips that support the next-generation wireless standard 802.11ax have been launched one after another, and even the first router that supports this wireless standard has been released, making the path for the WLAN (wireless local area network) standard to evolve to the sixth generation clearer and more real.

802.11g/n helps Wi-Fi dominate

When it comes to wireless standards, from the initial 802.11a and 802.11b to 802.11g, 802.11n, and the currently gradually becoming mainstream 802.11ac, each new wireless standard change will become a "highlight" of the Wi-Fi performance evolution.

Among them, the two standards with the widest impact and the longest application time span are 802.11g and 802.11n. It has been 14 years since the 802.11g wireless standard appeared in 2003, but it is probably only in recent years that it has been completely replaced by the 802.11n wireless standard.

802.11g wireless devices with a transmission rate of at least 54Mbps have played a key role in promoting the development and growth of Wi-Fi, as they can provide relatively fast and smooth wireless applications for enterprises and consumers. They have made the term "Wi-Fi" enter people's horizons and gradually become popular.

However, it is the full deployment of the 802.11n standard that really made Wi-Fi expand its territory and dominate the world. 802.11n introduced MIMO (Multiple Input Multiple Output) and carrier aggregation technology, which quickly increased the wireless rate to the 300Mbps and 450Mbps level wireless products that people are familiar with today. Moreover, 802.11n is not only compatible with the coverage advantage of 2.4GHz wireless band, but also supports large bandwidth and high-speed transmission of 5GHz wireless band, making the applicability of 802.11n wireless products even wider.

After that, whether in the consumer or enterprise field, the 802.11n standard actually dominated the market and became the standard protocol for various wireless devices.

802.11ac is changing rapidly

However, with the emergence of the 802.11ac wireless standard, the WLAN market has once again welcomed a new "king".

According to the WLAN (wireless local area network) market research data released by IDC on June 7, 2017, 802.11ac has become a highlight in the consumer WLAN market in the first quarter of 2017, with revenue and shipments increasing by 17.6% and 48.5% year-on-year respectively.

Even in enterprise-level wireless APs, shipments of APs equipped with the 802.11ac standard reached 70.9%, accounting for 84.7% of revenue, becoming a new driving force to replace the 802.11n standard. However, it is predicted that 802.11n will be completely eliminated by the end of 2018.

So after 802.11ac, which seems to have quite good performance, what other wireless standards can bring a qualitative leap to Wi-Fi?

The answer is only 802.11ax.

802.11ax takes over as the next generation of Wi-Fi

As the next generation Wi-Fi that succeeds 802.11ac, 802.11ax can achieve an average throughput of 4 times that of the 802.11ac standard in terms of theoretical wireless speed.

However, if we only look at the transmission rate, does the 802.11ad standard, which was once hotly discussed and can provide a high speed of 7Gbps, have a chance to become the successor of the next generation of Wi-Fi?

No. It turns out that 802.11ad uses the 60GHz frequency band for transmission, which has a very limited coverage range and huge transmission loss. It is only suitable as a complementary protocol to Wi-Fi. Therefore, 802.11ad was only awarded the title of "Beiler" and is officially called WiGig.

802.11ax, the "crown prince" in the IEEE's 802.11 protocol family development route, not only has obvious technical advantages in terms of transmission rate, anti-interference, and compatibility, but also has higher concurrency, stability, and energy-saving features than previous standards. Therefore, it has officially become the next-generation Wi-Fi standard to replace 802.11ac.

Three major technologies introduced into 802.11ax

Since it can be designated as the "successor", 802.11ax must have some extraordinary potential.

First, in terms of transmission, 802.11ax introduces a higher-order modulation and coding scheme, 1024QAM, which has higher coding and modulation efficiency than the 256QAM standard in 802.11ac. For example, in the case of a single stream with 80MHz bandwidth, the theoretical rate of 802.11ac is 433Mbps, while 802.11ax can reach 1.73Gbps. If multiple streams are transmitted with 160MHz bandwidth, the rate improvement will be even more significant.

Secondly, in terms of spectrum utilization, 802.11ax introduces OFDMA (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access) technology used in 4G LTE cellular base stations, allowing users to occupy only a subset of subcarriers within a specified time, greatly improving the utilization efficiency of the same channel bandwidth.

In addition, since 802.11ax uses a new spatial multiplexing technology, it can efficiently identify air interface conflicts and avoid them. Combined with dynamic idle channel assessment and dynamic power control, it also further improves interference signal recognition and noise reduction performance.

Furthermore, there is the uplink MU-MIMO (Multi-User Multiple Input Multiple Output) technology. Although MU-MIMO technology has been used in the 802.11ac standard, the multi-user mode for uplink is newly added and unique to 802.11ax, which can improve the synchronous transmission performance of multiple wireless terminals to the Wi-Fi access point (AP).

Taking the current 802.11ac standard as an example, if a 160MHz bandwidth is used, the theoretical wireless transmission rate of a single stream can reach 866Mbps, while 802.11ax can easily increase the transmission rate to 3.5Gbps. If 4 x 4 MIMO "four lanes" are added, the theoretical data throughput capacity of 802.11ax will soar to 14Gbps, which even exceeds the transmission speed of some fiber broadband.

A new round of upgrades will be ushered in

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All of the above features have obviously whetted users' appetite for the arrival of 802.11ax. It is foreseeable that in the future, in high-density scenarios such as stations, airports, schools, and stadiums, people will be able to connect to Wi-Fi networks freely and smoothly without worrying about disconnection or freezes. Even the efficient wireless transmission mechanism can save power for wireless terminals such as mobile phones and increase battery life.

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Now that 802.11ax wireless chips have been released, and the first batch of home routers supporting 802.11ax have just been unveiled, people feel that a new round of Wi-Fi upgrades is accelerating. Once the 802.11ax wireless standard is finalized, a large number of wireless terminal devices will quickly converge on 802.11ax, and the 6th generation of Wi-Fi will truly begin.