Draft 0.1 was approved and Comment Collection started
November 2016
Issue Draft 1.0 and start WG Letter Ballot — Failed (57.77%) LB 225: opened Dec. 1st, 2016 and closed Jan. 8th, 2017
September 2017
Draft 2.0 and WG Letter Ballot — Failed (62.84%) LB 230: opened Oct. 5th, 2017 and closed Nov. 4th, 2017
May 2018
Draft 3.0 and WG Letter Ballot — Passes (86.5%)
Janury 2019
Draft 4.0 and Recirculation Ballot — Passes (92.2%)
February 2019
Formation of Sponsor Ballot pool
March 2019
Mandatory Draft Review
July 2019
Initial Sponsor Ballot
January 2020
Final 802.11 Approval
March 2020
Conditional EC Approval
June 2020
RevCom submittal and publication
Best guess is that the participants in this working group and the makers of the Netgear Wi-Fi 6 draft products like Qualcomm (RAX120) Broadcom (RAX80, RAX200), and Intel/Lantiq (RAX40) might have an idea - personally I think it's much to early to get this answered what can be achieved on the draft hardware for the summer of 2020.
I wonder if the chips are designed in such a way that the manufacturers know that all it takes is a firmware update.
It seems that Netgear and the likes know that they could go ahead and release these routers without an issue as the rest of AX hardware specification is known and unlikely to change.
In terms of other aspects of the design, I hope that they are able to accommodate any last minute changes via firmawre upgrade.
It seems odd to have AX routers before AX has been finalised
It seems odd to have AX routers before AX has been finalised
Happened with any earlier 802.11 wireless development before, too - pre-standard hardware is flooded by the mainstream manufacturers - long before the final standard validation. There is zero guarantee and no formal promise that all final standard features can be be implemented by firmware updates.
