The next generation of Wireless communication has been trickling out over the past year, but this week, Wi-Fi 6 has been launched officially. The Wi-Fi Alliance, the organization that oversees implementation of the Wi-Fi standard, is launching its official Wi-Fi 6 certification program. That might sound boring, but it means the new wireless standard is truly ready to go, and tech companies will soon be able to advertise their products — mostly brand new ones — as certified to properly support it.
Wi-Fi 6 comes with many new technologies that combine together to make Wireless internet more efficient. This is particularly important because of just how many devices we all have these days — it’s not unusual for a family to have a dozen or more gadgets all connected to a Wi-Fi network at once.
Among the top features, includes the ability for Wi-Fi 6 to boost speeds within a crowded network. The theoretical maximum speed for Wi-Fi is increasing, too — to 9.6 Gbps from 3.5 Gbps — but those numbers don’t really matter since you’ll never get them at home. What matters is that this new wireless standard has a bunch of tools allowing it to operate faster and deliver more data at once, so the speeds you actually get will be higher than before. Those gains will be most noticeable on crowded networks, where the efficiency improvements will make up for the higher Wi-Fi demands.
The Alliance says Samsung’s Galaxy Note 10 will be the first smartphone certified for the new standard. The iPhone 11 and 11 Pro go on sale soon, and both support the new wireless standard . That’s going to quickly put millions of Wi-Fi 6 devices into people’s hands, meaning adoption of the new tech will very suddenly be well underway.
But because Wi-Fi 6 requires new hardware, most products currently on the market won’t be able to be updated to support it. Instead, expect new gadgets you buy from here out to be increasingly likely to support it.
