Faster Wi-Fi 6 starts off slowly

“Wi-Fi is starting to go through a generational change, the kind of big upgrade that only happens once every five years or so,” Jacob Kastrenakes writes for The Verge. “But while this faster new version of Wi-Fi has shown up inside plenty of routers across the CES show floor this week, it’s had a poor showing in the one place that really matters: our actual computing devices.”
“Only a handful of laptops — and no smartphones, tablets, smart home devices, PCs, or other gadgets that we’ve seen — have been announced this week with support for the new generation of Wi-Fi,” Kastrenakes writes. “That means that, even though you can go out to the store today and buy a next-gen Wi-Fi router, very few devices can actually take advantage of its faster speeds.”
“While there were no smartphones with Qualcomm’s upcoming Snapdragon 855 processor at the show, it’s already been announced that the chip will include support for Wi-Fi 6, too. That processor is destined for many of this year’s flagship Android phones,” Kastrenakes writes. “With any luck, Wi-Fi 6 support could hit the iPhone alongside its expected 2020 upgrade to 5G.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Don’t worry about it until late 2020, if then.
Key benefits of Wi-Fi CERTIFIED 6 technology include:
• Higher data rates
• Increased capacity
• Performance in environments with many connected devices
• Improved power efficiency
Key capabilities:
• Uplink and downlink orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) increases efficiency and lowers latency for high demand environments
• Multi-user multiple input, multiple output (MU-MIMO) allows more data to be transferred at one time, enabling access points (APs) to handle larger numbers of devices simultaneously
• Transmit beamforming enables higher data rates at a given range to increase network capacity
• 1024 quadrature amplitude modulation mode (1024-QAM) increases throughput for emerging, bandwidth-intensive use cases
• Target wake time (TWT) significantly improves battery life in Wi-Fi devices, including IoT clients
More about Wi-Fi 6 here.