Will Smith
What is Wi-Fi 6E?
TL;DR
Wi-Fi 6E is largest addition of new RF spectrum since…well ever! That means more channels, more throughput, better performance, less interference and an entirely new way to look at WLAN designs. Here are the highlights:
More Spectrum
1200 Mhz to be exact. That means that 6E has 3X the capacity alone when compared to the existing 2.4 and 5 Ghz spectrum in the US. Other countries are starting to adopt 6Ghz as well and capacity will vary from country to country.
Wider Channels
With the additional spectrum it’s now possible to deploy 160 Mhz wide channels at scale. This means much greater throughput and potential to unlock all kinds of high bandwidth applications that were previously not possible.
Key Features: OFDMA, WPA3, Target Wake Time (TWT), Optimistic Wireless Encryption (OWE)
- Orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) effectively shares channels to increase network efficiency and lower latency for both uplink and downlink traffic in high demand environments
- Multi-user multiple input, multiple output (multi-user MIMO) allows more downlink data to be transferred at one time, enabling access points (APs) to concurrently handle more devices
- 160 MHz channel utilization capability increases bandwidth to deliver greater performance with low latency
- Target wake time (TWT) significantly improves network efficiency and device battery life, including IoT devices
- 1024 quadrature amplitude modulation mode (1024-QAM) increases throughput for emerging, bandwidth intensive uses by encoding more data in the same amount of spectrum
- Transmit beamforming enables higher data rates at a given range to increase network capacity
Legacy Devices
Not an issue with 6E. As part of the 6E standard, devices must be capable of WPA3 and OWE. There is no backwards compatibility, which means 6E will be reserved for high performance newer devices (at least for the time being)
More to come….stay tuned