The standard for the next generation of Wi-Fi technology hasn’t been officially finalized. However, that hasn’t stopped chipsets, reference designs, and test equipment from making it to the market to support the transition to 802.11ax.
The 802.11ax ecosystem has begun picking up steam, with products from chipsets to access points — and the test equipment to make sure they work — making their debut this year. In fact, Aerohive announced in January, plans to deliver its first 802.11ax access points mid-2018 and thus should be available in the marketplace soon.
802.11ax is expected to make improvements to Wi-Fi in a few different areas including using 1024 QAM and OFDMA to increasing the physical link speed to 10 Gbps. 802.11ax will also be different than previous new Wi-Fi standards by aiming to deliver a more consistent, high throughput experience to customers in congested environments. The latter being one of the most highly anticipated features of the new standard.
KEY TAKEAWAYS:
- 802.11ax is expected to make improvements to Wi-Fi in a few areas
- The difference between 802.11ax and previous Wi-Fi gens may not be very noticeable for a residential Wi-Fi user but should be very noticeable in dense user environments.
- 802.11ax offers significant power usage improvements
- The path to a final standard for 802.11ax is still ongoing
“In early 2017, we saw the publication of Draft 1.0 of the 802.11ax standard. However, that early draft accrued more than 3,900 open technical comments,” Artisu wrote. “Infrastructure devices—routers, gateways, and extenders—with chipsets based on Draft 1.x (successive revisions of Draft 1.0) may not be interoperable with client devices that have chipsets based on Draft 2.0, and vice versa. The potential interoperability issues could result in degraded throughput, decreases in network efficiency and increased interference that could create a suboptimal user experience.”
Original source: https://www.rcrwireless.com/20180322/wireless/802-11ax-is-on-its-way
Leave A Comment