The Wi-Fi Alliance has announced the standard for the next-generation of Wi-Fi and that standard is Wi-Fi 6.

The first thing that people are thrown off by is the newer, uncommon naming convention. From basic consumers to techies alike, we are used to the 802.11 technology designations. I'm not saying the naming didn’t exist before, but the 802.11 standards designation was much more commonly used. To break it down simply, here is what Wi-Fi 6 translates to along with other well-known technologies:

• Wi-Fi 6→ 802.11ax
• Wi-Fi 5→ 802.11ac
• Wi-Fi 4→ 802.11n
• Wi-Fi 3→ 802.11g
• Wi-Fi 2→ 802.11a
• Wi-Fi 1→ 802.11b

That being said, you can treat the Wi-Fi 6 designation as a generation number of sorts.

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I am sure by now you’ve heard about the latest Wi-Fi technology, which is 802.11ax or Wi-Fi 6. We’ve been very active educating you about this standard for the past year. Please check out this blog series here.

We’ve been building a portfolio of high-performance 802.11ax APs to meet a broad range of enterprise needs. Last fall, we introduced our first 802.11ax campus access point, the 510 Series, which is ideal for midsize mobile and IoT deployments.

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Walking into Amazon Go store is stepping into the future. You scan your Amazon Go app and the gates open before you. You can pick up a healthy salad for lunch, a quick snack, or dinner. You just drop the items in your bag and walk out. Seconds later, you get a receipt for your purchase. It’s truly frictionless retail. Beyond the magic, there is technology: a foundation of digital signage, cameras, smart shelves, wayfinding, point-of-sale, CRM, connectivity, and much more.

Amazon Go is not alone: Numerous companies are trying to stay competitive by bringing these new experiences to their clients.

Why Use 802.11ax as an IoT Platform
At Aruba, we’ve been providing high-performance secure Wi-Fi connectivity to mobile devices for many years. With the addition of Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) radios into our access points, we opened up new opportunities that include wayfinding, geofencing, and asset tracking.

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Introduced in 1997, the IEEE 802.11 standard, more commonly known as Wi-Fi, has continually evolved to address the need of increased speeds in enterprise Wi-Fi networks. Of late, however, data rate and throughput have become table stakes in any high-density WLAN deployment.

That's because there has been an explosion in the number of client devices per household. Offices and public spaces like malls, stadiums, and concert venues also boast of highly dense client environments. The demand has shifted from "high speed Wi-Fi" to "fast and efficient Wi-Fi in extremely dense environments."

Enter 11ax. With the introduction of 802.11ax (also known as Wi-Fi 6), the wireless industry is now delivering bandwidth and efficiency several times that of the legacy 802.11b.

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There’s excitement building around 802.11ax, and for good reason. Newly designated as Wi-Fi 6 by the Wi-Fi Alliance, the next-generation 802.11 technology will deliver a better user experience, especially as the number and diversity of mobile and IoT devices continue to grow.

There’s no question that mobility and Wi-Fi have become an essential part of life. More than 35 billion Wi-Fi devices will ship by 2020—that’s four times the number of people on the planet. People already have laptops, phones, and tablets, and they are buying other devices like wearable health monitors and smart watches. The IoT market is set to soar, with some 20 billion IoT devices to be sold in the next few years for everything ranging from helping people to make healthier choices; creating workplaces that automatically adapt to our personal preferences; and helping farmers increase crop yields and to feed the eight billion people who will live on our planet by 2020.  

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It’s a mobile, cloud and IoT world. Whether it’s a workplace, a classroom or a dorm room, people are using a variety of devices beyond the usual phone and laptop combo—smart TVs, gaming consoles and fitness trackers, for starters. Offices, stores and manufacturing floors are outfitted with sensors that keep us safe, regulate the temperature, water the plants and run the production line. People use a broad variety of applications such as voice and video from their mobile devices. And expectations are at an all-time high. People will simply ditch digital services that don’t work. No one wants jittery presentations and dropped calls. The network experience must be flawless.

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Like the teenager with no driving experience who takes the family SUV on the open highway, even the simplest devices that are connecting to corporate networks have the power to participate in an attack and cause serious damage.

Courtesy of Moore’s Law, anything with an IP address must be now considered a potential threat. Ironically, 802.11ax introduces terrific new security features such as WPA3 and OWE. But, it also makes the WLAN even more IoT-friendly, given the support for dense concentrations of clients in environments such as smart buildings, where devices like lighting controls are as likely to be connected wirelessly as wired.

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By now you’ve heard countless stories for how insecure public Wi-Fi networks in coffee shops, bars, and large venues can be too dangerous for users – malware can infect personal devices, hackers can acquire usernames and passwords, and ransomware can hold private data hostage.

In places like airports, potentially millions of travelers are at risk to these types of cyberattacks because of open networks. According to an assessment by Coronet in a CNBC article, you can put a stop to these problems by not joining an open, public Wi-Fi network at all – or if you do, update your device software and use different passwords for different accounts in the event you do get hacked.

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Over the last decade, mobile has fueled unprecedented innovation. The economy is booming, and productivity has reached new heights. But the reality is that technology we use every day – mobile devices and applications included – consume an organization’s finite resources. With technology fueling customer experience and employee productivity across offices, schools and stores, organizations are always looking for ways to conserve energy and reduce costs.

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The all-electric powertrain Tesla model S provides a ludicrous acceleration. The car’s most performance-centric model, the P100D, uses its 100-kWh battery and two electric motors to achieve the highest speed—0-60 mph in 2.5 seconds, 762 horsepower, and 687 pound-feet of torque. It can comfortably seat five people with a sizable trunk while making the snowy drive to the mountains safe and comfortable. The sheer power, beauty, and luxury of a Tesla has been a recurring theme as we launch our first series of 802.11ax access points at Aruba.

Introducing the latest 802.11ax access points

Powerful, reliable, and high capacity are what you get from Aruba’s new 510 series 802.11ax (now known as Wi-Fi 6) campus access points. As more mobile and IoT devices rely on wireless access, networks have to accommodate a broad mix of devices, applications, and services. And that is even more challenging, especially now that we have very low tolerance for a bad user experience. Any voice delay or video jitter is no longer acceptable. So, before we jump into the 510 series, let’s see what 802.11ax is all about.

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Your customers want more than a just great product. They want a great experience. Businesses all around the world are embracing digital transformation to deliver new memorable, personalized experiences. Airbnb immerses guests into each host’s unique world. Experiential retail is bringing shoppers back into stores. Hospitals are reinventing themselves to create patient experiences that feel more like a “home away from home” to improve patient outcomes. While the digital era is disrupting business and creating new opportunities, it also brings with it challenges and rising expectations.

User Expectations are Growing

People want a great connected experience wherever they are, whether at work, in the classroom, at their favorite store or at the stadium. They are relentlessly unforgiving when their applications are slow or the Wi-Fi is spotty.

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When building networks in the ‘real world’ like city centers, stadiums, apartment buildings, and even office buildings, we frequently come across situations where many access points, installed independently or managed as one network, create overlapping coverage areas. When these access points choose to use the same channel, the performance of all users in such an area is reduced, as the Wi-Fi algorithm used to avoid collisions on the air is quite conservative.

One focus of the next Wi-Fi standard, 802.11ax is to improve the performance of ‘real-world’ networks. To this end, the new standard includes a feature enabling more simultaneous transmissions. This feature is known as ‘spatial reuse’ or ‘BSS coloring.’

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The next advance in Wi-Fi, 802.11ax, is fast approaching. As we seek to raise the performance bar yet again for the sixth generation of Wi-Fi, the traditional techniques used in 802.11n and 802.11ac – wider RF channels, more MIMO antennas, higher QAM modulation – have been pushed almost to the limit, and it’s time to look for new ideas.

802.11ax introduces techniques for ‘massive parallelism,’ especially OFDMA, multi-user MIMO, and ‘BSS coloring.’ All of these require the access point to make control decisions that have a significant effect on network performance, a new emphasis for Wi-Fi that will move access point networks closer to cellular base station infrastructure in terms of functionality.

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Today we focus on when new 802.11ax access points and client devices will become available. The Wi-Fi industry has made these questions uniquely difficult to answer, but this blog explains what we expect to happen. If you have the patience, save these predictions for rereading toward the end of 2019!

The three important milestones along the path to commercial equipment are the IEEE 802.11ax standard, the Wi-Fi Alliance 11ax certification, and integrated circuit chips. These are a sequence in time, but with a lot of overlap.

The First Milestone: IEEE
The IEEE writes standards: very detailed definitions of the packet formats, fields, and functions that make the protocols work. IEEE 802.11ax is written as an amendment to the current 802.11 standards and eventually will be folded into the mainstream 802.11 document. Even as an amendment, however, it is 600 pages long. Getting every detail of such a standard correct requires scrutiny from many experts, and the IEEE process involves reviewing drafts and submitting comments and corrections, which then update new drafts, and are reviewed again.

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As WLAN access point and device vendors work toward product launches at the end of 2018, we will publish a series of blogs covering all aspects of 802.11ax technology. This first one introduces the motivation and main features of 802.11ax.

Download our 802.11ax technical white paper.

How to Improve Today’s Wi-Fi?
When deciding how to improve Wi-Fi beyond the current release, 802.11ac, the IEEE and Wi-Fi Alliance surveyed Wi-Fi deployments and behavior in order to identify obstacles to wider use and causes of dissatisfaction among user communities. The conclusion was to focus more on performance under “typical” field conditions, a departure from previous upgrades that advanced peak data rates under “excellent” field conditions. With 802.11ax, peak performance and average and worst-case performance under real-world conditions will see improvements.

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