WiFi 6 Frequently Asked Questions

[Dustin_V]

What is WiFi 6?
WiFi 6, or 802.11ax, is the latest WiFi standard designed to improve your WiFi experience and meet the growing demands of WiFi by increasing performance and connected capacity. Where previous standards addressed and improved WiFi speeds, WiFi 6’s focus is more on alleviating capacity and congestion.

Significant key features include

• Delivering up to 4X connected capacity than previous generations
• Up to 12 simultaneous WiFi streams providing more speeds & range
• Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiple Access, or OFDMA, which significantly increases efficiency by delivering and receiving data to and from multiple devices at the same time

What does the term “WiFi 6” Mean?

802.11ax’s naming convention of WiFi 6 is the WiFi Alliance’s answer to provide users with an easy to understand designation of WiFi technology. Previous generations will also receive such designations to indicate those generations and technology. Here’s a breakdown of the numerical sequence:

WiFi 6 – Identifies 802.11ax technology

WiFi 5 – Identifies 802.11ac technology

WiFi 4 – Identifies 802.11n technology

What is OFDMA?

OFDMA enables your router and devices to use your bandwidth more efficiently by reducing the time between data transmissions. As a result, more bandwidth is available for other devices.

What is Connected Capacity?

Connected capacity refers to the number of devices connected to your WiFi network. With previous generations, as more and more devices connected, performance of you network would tend to degrade due to the amount of data being transferred between your router and devices. By increasing connected capacity, WiFi 6 routers are able to handle 4X the number of devices from previous generations.

When Will WiFi 6 End Devices be Available?
Today’s end devices that support WiFi 6 range from smart phones, to laptops, to WiFi cards. Industry leaders like Samsung and Apple both introduced their Samsung S10 and iPhone 11 lineups with WiFi 6 support. Additional companies that have announced WiFi 6 support for their products include Intel, Lenovo, Acer, Alienware, HP, MSI and more.

[Reddryder]

Have a ac750 (r6020) router. Getting 400mbs from Spectrum. After going through router and run speed test I am showing 42 ping 46.45 download speed and 22.94 upload. What is wrong

[RVasc]

Is there any issue with mounting it on a wall so the two antennae would be horizontal, not vertical

[Jonjon8]

Have you looked into the qos in settings. I was having the same issues and I unticked the qos,boom went straight to my available download speed

[minorgeek]

re:  Netgear discloses in the RAX120 fine print: "This router does not support some of the mandatory features ratified in Draft 3.0 of IEEE 802.11AX specification, such as Uplink OFDMA, Target Wake Time, and BSS Coloring. "

Does Netgear plan to add these features in wave 2?  add them via firmware update?  or necessary to buy new product?  when?

thanks

[minorgeek]

can anyone please point me to a decent white paper that explains the benefits and differences among:

      *Mu-mimo

      *OFDMA

      *Streams

      *Beamforming

rax120 claims 12 simultaneous streams.  but product sheet says 8 simultaneous streams.  what happened to the other 4?  8 is the limit of MU-MIMO with 8 (8x8) antennae, yes?  Then what do the extra 4 streams do?  and what about beamforming?  they all seem to be addressing the same need, simultaneous support of multiple devices.  how do they interact?

[minorgeek]

and RF multipath, too.