News + Trends

20 years of WLAN: Wi-Fi 6 certification launched

17.9.2019

Translation: machine translated

Wi-Fi 6 certification starts this week. This means that the new standard is fully finalised. But what are the new features and which devices are already supported?

Although some manufacturers - such as Apple - have not had devices certified for Wi-Fi for some time, after 20 years there are already 30 billion certified devices on the market. This is truly astonishing, as there were only one billion devices 10 years ago. But not only is the number of devices constantly increasing, the technology is also developing - this year we have already reached the IEEE 802.11ax standard, aka Wi-Fi 6. Certification of the latest standard begins this week.

What Wi-Fi 6 brings

The new 802.11ax standard has been given the name Wi-Fi 6 as a synonym, as decided by the Wi-Fi Alliance before its introduction in order to put an end to the previously cryptic names. As a result, the predecessors 802.11n and 802.11ac can now also be referred to as Wi-Fi 4 and Wi-Fi 5 respectively.

Aside from the new name, Wi-Fi 6 now supports the WPA3 encryption and authentication protocol. This should offer significantly better security than its predecessor - thanks in part to the introduction of SAE (Simultaneous Authentication of Equals), WPA3 should be more robust against attacks. Of course, the new standard is also expected to provide a performance boost in wireless connection quality. Thanks to the modulation method OFDMA (Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiple Access), the new technology should bring greater efficiency with lower latency times on both the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz frequency bands. The new standard also allows more data to be sent and received simultaneously.

Various improvements in Wi-Fi 6 bring new theoretical transmission rates of up to almost 10 Gbps. The standard also works better in environments with many connected employees. Nearby devices that use the same channels and frequencies theoretically cause less data congestion and delays. However, this feature only works properly if all devices used, ideally also those of the neighbours, are also equipped with Wi-Fi 6.