What is 802.11ax Wi-Fi?
Techquickie
·Techquickie
·2018-05-06
·
952 words · ~4 min read
0:00
thanks for watching Techquickie click the subscribe button then enable
0:03
notifications with the bell icon so you won't miss any future videos in a recent
0:07
episode we complained about confusing CPU naming schemes but you know what I
0:13
think Wi-Fi revision nomenclature may be
0:16
even worse I mean seriously they started
0:19
out with 802.11 which to the average person is
0:24
about as meaningless as a promise about political campaign finance reform and
0:28
then they stuck a bunch of seemingly random letters on the end like B G and
0:34
AC and AC wave too of all things now the
0:39
powers that be are giving us 802.11 ax
0:43
as our next Wi-Fi standard so either
0:46
they threw in an X to appeal to the younger generation Taco Bell style or
0:51
there were in between revisions that never made it into an end-user product
0:56
we'll never know what we do know is that
0:59
Wireless ax does look like it's going to bring some exciting improvements to your
1:04
Wi-Fi experience starting perhaps unsurprisingly with speed now if you
1:09
look at the spec on paper you might notice that the maximum theoretical
1:13
speed for the previous standard wireless AC wave 2 is
1:17
866 megabits per second for a single stream and then only 1201 for wireless a
1:24
X so it's higher but not a nearly
1:27
six-fold increase like when we went from n to AC but that is actually okay
1:33
because as some of you probably know the theoretical maximum speeds for Wi-Fi are
1:39
notoriously inaccurate anyway and real-world performance can vary widely
1:44
depending on range obstacles other
1:47
signals in the air and the quality of your access point and your device so to
1:52
address this wireless ax aims to improve
1:55
efficiency in a number of ways to give you consistently higher real-world
2:00
speeds than what you'd get with AC perhaps the biggest change is a feature
2:05
called OFDM a Optima well however you
2:09
say it what it does is chop up each wireless Channel into many smaller
2:15
partial channels which allows up to 30
2:18
different gadgets to talk to the access point at once over a single channel
2:23
instead of just one even though these sub channels are smaller than the main
2:27
channel the access point gets more flexibility allowing it to allocate
2:32
bandwidth to each device based on its data needs this should increase
2:37
performance over all OFDM a also works
2:40
in tandem with multi-user MIMO you can learn more about this up here but the
2:44
gist of it is that multi-user MIMO allows an access point to address
2:48
multiple devices simultaneously instead of one at a time sequentially and while
2:54
multi-user MIMO was introduced for consumers with last gen wireless AC
2:59
wireless a X improves on it not only by
3:02
allowing 8 simultaneous streams instead of just 4 but also by enabling it for
3:08
both uploads and downloads so uploading photos or streaming video
3:13
from a crowded area like a trade show or a concert venue with Wireless ax support
3:19
should get a fair bit easier another cool feature is the addition of color
3:23
and oh I don't mean that wireless ax
3:27
will make the color on your crappy $200 notebook screen look better instead it
3:31
supports a feature called VSS color which is an identifier that is attached
3:36
to each data chunk or frame to indicate
3:40
what wireless network it came from you see access points typically wait to
3:45
transmit if there's already another frame flying through the air with BSS
3:50
color and ap can tell which frames are coming from other networks and ignore
3:56
them as long as they're below a threshold of weakness to prevent
4:00
interference this should help avoid unnecessary slowdowns and if all these
4:04
improvements aren't enough wireless ax can utilize both 2.4 and 5 gigahertz
4:10
bands with tech companies currently trying to get even more spectrum in the
4:14
6 gigahertz range allocated to Wi-Fi and for your battery-powered devices it
4:19
supports yet another new feature called target wakeup time that allows gadgets
4:24
to negotiate how often and for how long
4:28
they will need to transmit or receive data this allows the Wi-Fi transponder
4:33
to sleep when transmission isn't necessary which should help to preserve
4:37
precious battery life once a X devices
4:40
are available but when will that be
4:44
ah I'm glad you asked well the first
4:47
devices will be routers as usual with earlybird network vendors like a soos
4:51
planning mid 2018 launches so since the
4:55
new standard is backwards compatible you could make the upgrade early if you
4:59
wanted to and as for client devices well
5:02
the word on the street is that phones and laptops will probably start hitting
5:07
the consumer market sometime in 2019
5:11
Tunnel Barre is the simple VPN app that makes it easy to browse privately and
5:15
enjoy a more open Internet with tunnel bear turned on your connection is
5:19
secured and your data is kept private from your internet provider
5:24
advertisers or anyone lose looking to track you or profit from the data that
5:30
you generate while you use services and browse the web online Tunnel bear has a
5:35
top rated privacy policy and does not log your activity so try them out for
5:39
free there's no credit card required at tunnel bear comm slash Linus we're gonna
5:44
have that linked below it's tunnel bear comm slash Linus so thanks for watching
5:49
guys if you just like this video you can do that or you can like or you can check
5:52
out other channels or comment with video suggestions and subscribe