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Linksys WRT 1900AC. Curvier, and with four antennae.

Wireless standards tend to get proposed, drafted, and finally accepted at what seems like a glacial stride. It's been roughly 17 years since we began to see the first 802.11b wireless routers and laptops. In the intervening fourth dimension, nosotros've but seen three more than mainstream standards take hold since then: 802.11g, 802.11n, and now 802.11ac. (I'thou leaving out some bottom-used ones like 802.11a for the purposes of this story.)

Now a new standard looms over the horizon. And if you lot thought that your new 802.11ac router'southward maximum speed of 1,300Mbps was already fast, think again. With 802.11ac fully certified and out the door, the Wi-Fi Alliance is looking at its successor, 802.11ax — and it looks pretty enticing. While y'all may have a hard fourth dimension getting more than than 400Mbps to your smartphone via 802.11ac, 802.11ax should evangelize real-world speeds above 2Gbps. And in a lab-based trial of technology similar to 802.11ax, Huawei striking a max speed of x.53Gbps, or around 1.iv gigabytes of information transfer per 2d. Clearly, 802.11ax is going to be fast. But what is it exactly?

What is 802.11ax Wi-Fi?

The easiest way to think of 802.11ax is to showtime with 802.11ac — which allows for up to 4 different spatial streams (MIMO) — and then to massively increment the spectral efficiency (and thus max throughput) of each stream. Similar its predecessor, 802.11ax operates in the 5GHz band, where there'southward a lot more than space for wide (80MHz and 160MHz) channels.

With 802.11ax, you get 4 MIMO (multiple-input-multiple-output) spatial streams, with each stream multiplexed with OFDA (orthogonal frequency division access). In that location is some confusion hither as to whether the Wi-Fi Alliance and Huawei (which leads the 802.11ax working grouping) mean OFDA, or OFDMA. OFDMA (multiple access) is a well-known technique (and is the reason LTE is excellent for what it is). Either way, OFDM, OFDA, and OFDMA refer to methods of frequency-division multiplexing — each channel is separated into dozens, or fifty-fifty hundreds, of smaller subchannels, each with a slightly different frequency. By so turning these signals through correct-angles (orthogonal), they can be stacked closer together and still exist easily demultiplexed.

According to Huawei, the use of OFDA increases spectral efficiency past 10 times, which essentially translates into 10 times the max theoretical bandwidth, merely 4x is seeming like more of a existent-world possibility.

5GHz channels in North America

This lovely diagram shows you North America's 5GHz channels, and where those 20/40/lxxx/160MHz blocks fit in. As you can come across, at 5GHz, you won't ever get more than than 2 160MHz channels (and fifty-fifty then, only if you alive in the boonies without interference from neighbors).

How fast is 802.11ax?

Allow'south say we take the more than bourgeois 4x approximate, and assume a massive 160MHz channel. In that case, the maximum speed of a unmarried 802.11ax stream volition exist around 3.5Gbps (compared with 866Mbps for a single 802.11ac stream). Multiply that out to a iv×four MIMO network and you lot get a total capacity of 14Gbps. If you had a smartphone or laptop capable of ii or three streams, you'd get some blazing connection speeds of 1GB per 2nd or more than.

In a more than realistic setup with 80MHz channels, we're probably looking at a single-stream speed of around 1.6Gbps, which is still a reasonable 200MB/sec. If your mobile device supports MIMO, you could be seeing 400 or 600MB/sec. And in an even more realistic setup with 40MHz channels (such as what you lot'd probably get in a crowded apartment block), a unmarried 802.11ax stream would cyberspace you 800Mbps (100MB/sec), or a total network capacity of 3.2Gbps. (Read: How to boost your Wi-Fi speed past choosing the right channel.)

802.11ax range, reliability, and other factors

So far, neither the Wi-Fi Alliance nor Huawei has said much about 802.11ax'due south other important features. Huawei says "intelligent spectrum allocation" and "interference coordination" volition be employed, but virtually mod Wi-Fi hardware already does that.

It's fairly safe to presume that working range volition stay the same or increase slightly. Reliability should improve a piffling with the inclusion of OFDA, and with the aforementioned spectrum resource allotment and interference coordination features. Congestion may also be reduced as a result, and because data volition be transferred between devices faster, that frees the airwaves for other connections.

Otherwise, 802.11ax will piece of work in roughly the aforementioned fashion as 802.11ac — only with massively increased throughput. As nosotros covered in our Linksys WRT1900AC review, 802.11ac is already pretty not bad. 802.11ax will just take things to the next level.

Do nosotros need these kinds of speeds?

The problem, as with all things Wi-Fi, isn't necessarily the speed of the network itself — it's congestion, and more than that even, it'south what the devices themselves are capable of. For example, even 802.11ax's slowest speed of 100MB/sec is pushing it for a difficult drive — and it'southward faster than what the eMMC NAND flash storage in about smartphones can handle also. Best-example scenario, a modern smartphone'southward storage tops out at effectually 90MB/sec sequential read, 20MB/sec sequential write — worst instance, with lots of little files, y'all're looking at speeds in the unmarried-megabyte-per-second range. Obviously, for the wider 80MHz and 160MHz channels, you're going to need some desktop SSDs to take advantage of 802.11ax'south max speeds.

Not every use-case requires you to read or write data to a tiresome storage medium. But nonetheless, alternate uses like streaming 4K video yet fall brusk of these multi-gigabit speeds. Even if Netflix begins streaming 8K in the next few years (and you thought there wasn't enough to watch in 4K!), 802.11ax has more than than enough bandwidth. And the bottleneck isn't your Wi-Fi there; it's your internet connection. The current time frame for 802.11ax certification is 2022 — until then, upgrading to 802.11ac (if y'all haven't already) should be a nice stopgap.

Sebastian Anthony wrote the original version of this commodity. It has since been updated several times with new data.