Just how FAST is WiFi 6?

Every once in a while I feel like the stars align perfectly for me, we were literally in the middle of planning a Wi-Fi upgrade so we could test out the new Wi-Fi Six capabilities of the Samsung Galaxy S10 series when our friends at Cisco reached out to sponsor a video explaining the benefits of Wi-Fi Six, so we said, yeah, you know that beastly new access point. Well, I think to really show the benefits of Wi-Fi Six I probably need a couple of those okay, yeah, that's done, so today's video is about what Wi-Fi 6 is, why you might care about it, and when can you expect widespread adoption and we're also going to test it with the brilliant. new galaxy s10 plus so buckle up because it will be fun while our apps are installed.

Let's talk about what is physically the same. The hardware for wi-fi 6 is quite similar, so on the client side, cell phones and other device manufacturers. They can continue to rely on the antenna design experience they have gained from previous generations of Wi-Fi and the battery consumption of the new Wi-Fi 6 chipsets is even expected to increase during times of continuous high-speed data transfer. , and even then that's

just

because the data rate is higher, nothing really changes there, as for the implementation which is basically the same, remember your best practices for application positioning, run your ethernet and connect everything to your network switch because Wi-Fi 6 is backward compatible with any legacy client on the network you won't even notice the difference.

Now let's talk about what's different, which is basically everything, starting even with the name. Wi-Fi is undergoing a much-needed and surprisingly sensible rebrand right now from 802.11, something for those curious by the way, this generation. generations of simple numbers were going to be called 802.11 ax, so ac becomes five n becomes four and so on with these little icons that are designed to inform consumers which generation is supported by both their client and the application in which they are found. Connected to the next step is deployment, yes ok it's not exactly the same so Wi-Fi six handles more clients and messier environments better so you might not need as many apps which is nice , but be careful because you are not going to be saving money here, each of those access points could handle multiple gigabits of data per second on literally hundreds of clients, so your basic gigabit poe, your basic gigabit pov switch will no longer be enough, so we moved to this meraki. ms355 24x2, its 24 multi-gigabit ports could actually be fully loaded with mr55 access points thanks to its beefy 740 watt power supply and this thing is rated for up to a second of switching capacity and all of that is important because , although it is rated at only 39

fast

er performance, about 600 megabits per second versus 433 on a single 80 megahertz and 5 gigahertz channel thanks to packing more data into each payload Wi-Fi 6 has some features that really They change the rules of the game when it comes to multi-client access. to result in much higher overall data rates and less weighting, so firstly, access points can be configured with up to eight by eight antenna configuration, that is, eight for sending and eight for receive and, in addition, Wi-Fi 6 supports up to eight simultaneous downlink streams with multi-user memo, which is a large increase over the four simultaneous downlink streams that were supported by Wi-Fi 5, so This widening of the highway, so to speak, is a big part of what will make the sixth generation so critical to making Wi-Fi usable in large venues like sports stadiums and crowded concert halls, but not even It gets closer to the big picture.

The next big innovation for large-scale deployments was actually borrowed from cellular networks with Wi-Fi 6, the band or the The frequency range that would have made up a traditional channel can be divided using a technique called data division multiple access. orthogonal frequency or ofdma so you know how one of the best pro tips for anyone living in an apartment is to use a scanner to see what channels you are listening to. neighbors are on and then manually switch to a different one; forget about that. Ofdma allows each band, whether 20 to 40 or up to 160 megahertz, to be split into multiple chunks of up to 78 subchannels and each of those can be assigned to a separate client now, obviously, to make all of this work, the point Access needs to get a little smarter.

Fortunately, it did with Wi-Fi 6. An AP can negotiate what are called deterministic connections, which allows it to exercise a lot. of control over connected clients and how they are allowed to behave, so first it is dynamically assigned to a client, no matter how many channels or subchannels can be reserved at that time, then things get even crazier, each client has a schedule for when you are allowed to broadcast. and receive data now wait a second. I know that in the computing world scheduling a data transmission usually means higher latency, which is one of the biggest problems with

wifi

today, but in practice what this means is less collision mitigation overhead, which means there's actually, there's less waiting, think of it as a perfectly executed zipper combo on the road, so it's actually going to reduce latency, which means yeah, friends who play on Wi-Fi without Leg spikes might be a thing with Wi-Fi.

Six, imagine another fun. The thing about deterministic connections is that they can be used to save power so you know you're connected. Turn on the smart light. Your Amazon button. For me, no, okay, how about I have something for myself now? No, it's okay, with scheduled checks called target wake time, your devices can check in much less frequently, dramatically increasing battery life. However, the best thing about Wi-Fi Six is ​​not the technical specifications as much as I personally get very excited about those things, rather it is the different experiences they allow, like have you ever tried having a stealth video chat on the back of a conference room or upload a video to YouTube from a large event? a total disaster and I mean even something as stupid as taking a lunch break during a conference can completely ruin your mobile experience since everyone is accessing Facebook at exactly the same time, well thanks to everything I've already talked about and, in fact, to a large number of others.

New features include better spatial frequency reuse of beamforming and dynamic fragmentation that makes better use of the available spectrum. Oh man, I actually forgot to mention that also in the future we will get more spectrum in the five to six gigahertz range that it's going to be. Well, anyway, the point is that with all this new technology, this is not like an incremental generational evolutionary improvement and you could even argue that this is the biggest fundamental change we've seen so far for Wi-Fi and, for For my part, I'm excited, but there's always a friend, right? The only thing that kills today is that while Wi-Fi Six is ​​backwards compatible, you'll have to wait a little longer to enjoy the amazing experience I've talked about here because the promises of Wi-Fi 6 can only be implemented by complete once client devices supporting these new features begin to outperform their legacy counterparts.

Now the good news is that at least they are showing up now, so all that's left in this video is to take our s10 plus for a quick test drive, now one problem I have is that we don't have a couple hundred of these, so I'm not going to be able to do a mega client test or anything like that, but at least we can do I'm sure everything is working properly here in the office with a quick speed test, so without further ado, let's see how

fast

we can make this work. The first thing I notice when connecting to our new access point is that I remember those little icons I told you about.

Guys, it's right at the top of the phone, Wi-Fi Six, so you know you're negotiating your link using the right generation of technology, so that's great for us, remember we

just

upgraded to 10 gigabit internet. So as long as we can find a speed test server that can support recording, all we have to do is run a simple speed test here and see what kind of speeds we can get and I've never seen anything like this. that 800 megabits per second upload speed, guys, it's not just Wi-Fi, it's Wi-Fi on a mobile device, it's a two-by-two antenna configuration, actual speeds of like 800 we're getting close to yeah I actually plugged a USB Type C dongle into my phone and plugged it into the wall, that's absolutely amazing and like I said before, it's absolutely just the tip of the iceberg, so thanks for watching guys, thanks to Cisco for sponsoring this video yeah they do not like it. you can hit that button, but if you liked it, hit like, subscribe or maybe consider checking out where to buy the things that we featured, especially if you're a small business owner, at the link in the video description, also below is our store of products, which has cool t-shirts like the one I'm wearing, as well as our community forum that you should join.