Every once in a while, it feels like the stars just align perfectly for me.
We were literally right in the middle of planning a Wi-Fi upgrade
so that we could test the brand new Wi-Fi 6 capabilities of the Samsung Galaxy S10 series
when our buds over at Cisco reached out to sponsor a video explaining the benefits of Wi-Fi 6.
So we were like, uh, so yeah, you know that beastly new access point?
Well, I think to really show off the benefit of Wi-Fi 6, we'd probably need a couple of those.
That okay? Yeah? So done?
So today's video then is all about what Wi-Fi 6 is, why you might care,
and when you can expect widespread adoption.
And we're also going to take it for a test drive with the shiny new Galaxy S10+.
So strap in, because this is going to be fun.
While our APs are being installed,
let's talk about what is the same.
Physically, the hardware for Wi-Fi 6 is actually quite similar.
So on the client side, cell phone and other device manufacturers can continue to lean on the antenna design experience
that they've gained from previous generations of Wi-Fi,
with even the battery consumption of new Wi-Fi 6 chipsets
only expected to increase during times of continuous high-speed data transfer.
And even then, that's only because the data rate is higher.
So nothing really changes there.
As for the deployment, that's basically the same.
Remember your best practices for AP positioning, run your Ethernet,
and wire everything up to your network switch.
Because Wi-Fi 6 is backwards compatible, any legacy clients on the network won't even know the difference.
Now, let's talk about what is different, which is basically everything, starting with even the name.
Wi-Fi is undergoing a much-needed and
surprisingly sensible rebranding right now, from 802.11 something something,
for those curious, by the way, this generation was going to be called 802.11ax,
to simple numbered generations.
So AC becomes 5, N becomes 4, and so on and so forth,
with these little icons that are designed to inform consumers which generation is supported by both their client
and the AP that they happen to be connected to.
Next up is the deployment.
Yeah, okay, it's not quite the same.
So Wi-Fi 6 handles more clients and more cluttered environments better.
So you might not actually need as many APs, which is nice,
but watch out, because you're not going to be saving a buck here.
Each of those access points could be handling multiple
gigabits of data per second across literally hundreds of clients.
So your commodity gigabit PoE suite,
your commodity gigabit PoE switch isn't going to cut it anymore.
So we're moving to this Meraki MS355-24x2.
It's 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 at up to 640 gigabit per second of switching capacity.
And all of that is important.
Because even though it's rated at a mere
39% faster throughput,
so about 600 megabit per second versus 433 on a single 80 megahertz 5 gigahertz channel,
thanks to packing more data into each payload,
Wi-Fi 6 has some truly game-changing features when it comes to multi-client access
that are going to result in far higher overall data rates and less waiting.
So first of all, access points can be configured
with up to an 8x8 antenna configuration.
So that is 8 for sending and 8 for receiving.
And on top of that, Wi-Fi 6 supports up to 8 concurrent downlink streams with multi-user MIMO.
That is a huge increase over the 4 concurrent downlink streams that was supported with Wi-Fi 5.
So this widening of the highway, so to speak,
is a big part of what's going to make Gen 6 so critical to making Wi-Fi usable in large venues.
Like sports arenas and crowded concert halls.
But it's not even close to the entire picture.
The next huge innovation for large-scale deployments was actually borrowed from cellular networks.
With Wi-Fi 6, the band or the frequency range that would have made up a traditional channel
can be split using a technique called Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access
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 your neighbors are on and then
manually switch over to a different one? Well, forget about it.
OFDMA allows each band, be it 20, 40, or all the way up to 160 megahertz, to be split up into multiple chunks as many as 78 sub-channels and each one of those can be allocated to a separate client.
Now obviously, to make all of this work, the access point
needs to get a little bit smarter.
Fortunately, it did. With Wi-Fi 6, an AP can negotiate what are called
Deterministic Connections, allowing it to exercise a great deal of control over the connected clients and how they're allowed to behave.
So first, a client gets dynamically assigned however many channels or sub-channels can be spared at that moment.
Then, things get even crazier. Each client gets a schedule for when it's allowed to transmit
and receive data.
Now, hold on a second. I know that in the computing world,
scheduling a data transmission usually means increased latency,
which is one of the biggest issues with Wi-Fi today.
But in practice, what this means is less collision mitigation overhead, which means that there's actually less waiting around.
Think of it kind of like a perfectly executed zipper merge on the highway, so it will actually reduce latency.
That means, yes friends, gaming online,
gaming on Wi-Fi without legs bikes could actually be a thing with Wi-Fi 6. Go figure.
Another fun feature of Deterministic Connections is that they can be used to save power.
So, you know your connected smart light switch, your Amazon button, your asset tags, etc, etc, etc.
Right now, they waste a ton of power constantly checking in with the network.
Hey, you got anything for me? No? Okay. How about now? Got anything for me? No? Okay.
Well, with scheduling,
with gradual check-ins called target wake-up time, your devices can check in far less frequently,
dramatically increasing their battery life.
The coolest thing about Wi-Fi 6, though, is not the techy specs, as much as I personally get really amped on that stuff.
Rather, it's the different experiences that it enables. Like, have you ever tried to stealthily have a video chat at the back of a lecture
hall or
upload a video to YouTube from a large event? It's a total mess. And I mean, even something as stupid as
breaking for lunch during a conference can absolutely crush your mobile experience as
everyone jumps on Facebook at exactly the same time.
Well, thanks to everything I've talked about already, and actually a whole host of other new features,
including better beamforming, spatial frequency reuse, and dynamic fragmentation, which makes better use of the available spectrum.
Oh, man, actually, I forgot to mention that, too. Down the line,
we're even getting more spectrum in the 5 to 6 gigahertz range.
That's gonna be sweet. Anyway, the point is, with all of this new tech,
this is not like an incremental,
generational, evolutionary improvement. And you could even argue that this is the biggest
fundamental change that we've seen yet for Wi-Fi. And I, for one, am stoked.
But,
there's always a but, isn't there? The one buzzkill today is that while Wi-Fi 6 is backwards compatible,
you're gonna have to wait a little while
longer for the kick-ass experience that I've talked about here, because the promises of Wi-Fi 6 can only be fully realized
once client devices with support for these new features start to overtake their legacy counterparts.
Now, the good news is that at least they're already showing up.
So, all that's left in this video, then, 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 gonna be able to do that.
I'm not gonna be able to do, like, a mega-client test or anything like that,
but we can at least make sure that everything's working properly here in the office with a quick speed test.
So, without further ado, let's see just how fast we can make this go.
So, the first thing that I noticed, just connecting to our new access point, is that, remember those little icons
I told you guys about? It's right there at the top of the phone.
Wi-Fi 6, so you'll know that you're negotiating your link using the correct generation of the technology. So, that's pretty cool.
Then, for us, remember, we just upgraded to 10 gigabit intranet, so as long as we can find a speed test server that can
take the burn, then all we got to do is run a simple speed test here, and have a look at what kind of speeds that we can get.
And I have never seen anything like this.
That upload speed.
800 megabit per second. Guys, not only is this Wi-Fi, this is Wi-Fi on a mobile device.
This is a 2x2 antenna.
This is a 2x2 antenna configuration. That is real-world speeds of
like 800. We're getting close to if I actually plugged a USB type-c dongle into my phone and plugged it into the wall.
That's absolutely incredible. And like I said before, it is absolutely just the tip of the iceberg.
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