What is WiFi6 in routers?

In the communications market, if you want to evaluate internet celebrities.

Since 2020, WiFi 6 has definitely become an internet celebrity in the router market.

The fire was a complete mess.

The word WiFi seems to have been born together with the IPhone4 in the Steve Jobs era.

At that time, it seemed to be a very fashionable leisure and entertainment activity to go to McDonald’s or KFC with a Nokia 5230 and Motorola to use WiFi.

Picture from: Baidu

XX Hotel, the WIFE scene covering the entire building should no longer exist.

So what kind of new technology is WiFi 6? It actually means the 6th generation wireless technology—IEEE 802.11 ax.

Since WiFi is IEEE 802.11 ax, you might as well learn more about it and find out what WiFi 6 is.

1. What is IEEE?

IEEE is the abbreviation of Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, which means the Institute of Electronic Technology and Information Science Engineers. Although this association is not well known to most people, it affects each of our lives everywhere.

Here comes the knowledge point. This association is still an organization led by the United States. It is the largest non-profit professional technical society in the world, with more than 400,000 members in more than 160 countries. The organization has a strong reputation in international computers and telecommunications. , biomedicine, electricity and consumer electronic technology products and other academic fields are major authorities.

Let me add a topic. The reason why the United States is so powerful and has long been named the most powerful country in the universe is not just a boast. It is a truly powerful group and has absolute say in various high-tech fields, especially in the field of information. A rich fortune was accumulated during the Industrial Revolution era.

Picture from: Baidu

2. What is IEEE 802?

Closer to home, IEEE has defined various standards, among which IEEE 802 is also known as LMSC (LAN/MAN Standards Committee, Local Area Network/Metropolitan Area Network Standards Committee), which is dedicated to studying services defined in the physical layer and MAC layer of local area networks and metropolitan area networks. and protocols, corresponding to the lowest two layers of the OSI network reference model (i.e., physical layer and data link layer).

Most of the IEEE 802 standards were formulated in the 1980s. With the continuous advancement of network technology, many new standards have been expanded and formulated. Therefore, the IEEE 802 family has gradually become larger and has more members. The main specifications of the IEEE 802 regulations define how the network card accesses the transmission medium (such as optical cable, twisted pair, wireless, etc.) and how to transmit data on the transmission medium. It also defines the establishment, maintenance and operation of connections between network devices that transmit information. Ways to dismantle.

Products that comply with the IEEE 802 standard include network cards, bridges, routers, and other components used to build local area networks. Intuitively speaking, you can open your mobile phone and find your wireless LAN address. Only through the assigned address can we access the Internet. In fact, this is a little reflection of the standards defined by IEEE802.

3. What exactly is WiFi 6?

I seem to have talked about a lot of useless stuff before, but if I want to talk about WiFi 6 in depth, IEEE802.11 still cannot be bypassed.

You may have questions again, what is 802.11?

You must know that LAN is a big concept, which contains many protocols at various levels of the network, such as 802.11. The main definition is the wireless LAN medium access control sublayer and physical layer specification (Wireless LAN), which is what we The “WLAN” that can be seen on mobile phones every day is what we habitually call the button to turn on WiFi.

Let’s talk about 802.11 next. This standard also has a separate definition for 802.11az. So what should I do if 26 letters are not enough? OK, then add two letters to make IEEE 802.11ax. From Since 2014, the IEEE 802.11 working group has begun to develop a new standard IEEE 802.11ax, which is now WiFi 6, to address such issues.

Why did the IEEE 802.11ax generation have to replace it with Arabic numerals?

802.11 a, b, g, n…what the hell, they are still jumping around to name them.

I would like to ask you how to choose a router before buying it? Should I just choose one if there are many antenna poles? Choose if the shell is big? Just buy the Gigabit Thru-Wall King? Does anyone know about 802.11 a, b, g, n? I believe that most of the time we don’t pay attention to such technical details.

Picture from: Baidu

It fully shows that the previous network protocols are very unfriendly to ordinary consumers, and the naming of WiFi technology is very complicated and cumbersome.

So, there is only one truth behind the birth of WiFi 6: it is simple and easy to remember.

On October 4, 2018, the WiFi Alliance announced that it would rename the next generation WiFi technology 802.11AX to WiFi 6. The name of 802.11AX has changed, and the names of previous generations of WiFi must also be changed accordingly. After changing to numbers, the WiFi names will be simple and unified, and users will Highly identifiable.

The following are the years WiFi appeared and the new WiFi names:

802.11b — WiFi 1 (1999)

802.11a — WiFi 2 (1999)

802.11g — WiFi 3 (2003)

802.11n — WiFi 4 (2009)

802.11ac — WiFi 5(2014)

802.11ax — WiFi 6(2018)

3. What can WiFi 6 do?

The front is a bunch of nonsense again, so what can WiFi 6 do?

On February 13, 2020, Lei Jun released Xiaomi 10 equipped with Wi-Fi 6 technology, and also released the first Xiaomi AIoT router AX3600 that supports Wi-Fi 6. According to our Rebus, WiFi 6 has the following characteristics:

Picture from: Baidu

Compared with previous WiFi4, WiFi5, etc., WiFi 6 has faster speed, more power-saving terminals, and more access devices.

I have been trying to design a simple and easy-to-understand diagram to help you understand these obscure technical concepts, but it seems that it is more difficult to find analogous scenes, and they are not so appropriate. Okay, let’s just talk about the conclusion:

Advantage 1: Data transmission efficiency is higher

Direct impact: More terminals can be connected to your home router at the same time, and you will no longer have to worry about competing for WiFi.

The difference between WiFi 6 and previous generations of wireless technology is that it has upgraded MU-MIMO (Multi-UserMultiple-Input Multiple-Output, multi-user-multiple-input multiple-output). On the basis of Wi-Fi 5wave2 supporting downlink MU-MIMO, Wi-Fi 6 adds uplink MU-MIMO, which means that WiFi 6 supports 8 terminal devices at one time to transmit more uplink/downlink data, which is twice that of WiFi 5. The biggest benefit here is when playing games. You don’t have to wait in line to wait for your girlfriend who is watching TV series. You can directly transfer it to the server through the router. There will no longer be a delay in the operation due to router problems.

Advantage 2: Faster data transfer rate

Direct impact: surfing the Internet, whoosh ~ fast!

Unlike WiFi 5 which uses OFDM (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing) technology, WiFi 6 borrows OFDMA used in cellular networks. Multiple terminals can transmit in parallel at the same time without having to wait in line or compete with each other, thus improving efficiency and reducing latency. Originally, only one carrier could transmit one data packet in one time period. Using OFDMA means that multiple carriers can transmit multiple data packets simultaneously in one time period. And WiFi 6 has a higher-order modulation method (1024-QAM). Under the 160MHz channel width, WiFi 6 has a single-stream theoretical maximum speed of 1201Mbit/s and a theoretical maximum data throughput of 9.6Gbps. The fifth generation of 802.11ac (Wi-Fi 5) has the fastest single-stream bandwidth of 867Mbit/s and a theoretical maximum data throughput of 3.47Gbps. Compared with WiFi 5 (802.11ac), the single-stream rate is increased by 1.4 times and the throughput is increased by 2.7 times. In theory, the average delay of WiFi 6 is reduced to 20ms, and the average delay of WiFi 5 is 30ms.

The above-mentioned technology changes ensure that WiFi 6 has more advantages in data transmission rate.

Advantage 3: The terminal saves more power

Direct impact: Mobile phone batteries can last longer, last longer, or last longer.

The power consumption comparison between WiFi 6 and WiFi 5 is also very different. WiFi 6 uses TWT (target wake-up time). The router can uniformly schedule the sleep and data transmission time of wireless terminals. It can not only wake up and coordinate the timing of wireless terminals to send and receive data, reduce the situation of multiple devices competing for channels out of order, but also can Terminals are grouped into different TWT cycles to increase sleep time and improve device battery life. That is, the wireless router will negotiate the WiFi wake-up time with the terminal to wake up on demand and consume no power during other sleep times. WiFi 5 can only communicate with one device at the same time. All terminals connected to the same route are either in the transmission state or in the waiting state, and are disordered. The waiting state still consumes power.

According to Huawei’s calculations, it will roughly reduce the power consumption of the terminal by 30%. Of course, this is a theoretical value.

Advantage 4: The Internet is safer

Direct impact: cracking passwords, using the Internet… I will never see such a shameless and nasty person again.

Because WiFi 6 devices must adopt the new generation encryption security protocol WPA3 in order to pass WiFi Alliance certification. It can prevent powerful attacks, brute force cracking, etc., making security more secure. WPA3 is a new generation of wireless encryption protocol and an upgraded version of the WPA2 encryption protocol. Devices equipped with this new encryption protocol can surf the Internet with complete confidence.

So how strong is WPA3 encryption?

WPA3 supports the use of wireless encryption algorithms when a terminal is connected to an open Wi-Fi network. Even if a password is not entered when connecting, the traffic between the device and the WiFi access point will be encrypted. This will make public open WiFi network connections more private. Secondly, it can prevent brute force cracking. WPA3 encryption method uses SAE algorithm, which replaces the PSK algorithm in WPA2. In previous attack scenarios on Wi-Fi, attackers usually use automated tools to quickly and continuously try various passwords to guess the password of the Wi-Fi network. The SAE algorithm can effectively prevent this brute force cracking method. If the authentication request fails, the authentication request will be blocked. Even if the attacker obtains the WiFi password, he will not be able to decrypt the communication traffic of other users on the network, greatly improving security.

Finally, how can you experience the full WiFi6 performance?

Three conditions are required: the router supports WiFi6, wireless Internet devices such as mobile phones and computers support WiFi6, and the broadband is preferably Gigabit broadband.

Otherwise…just keep using WiFi 5.

Other keywords:

4G industrial router, passerelle IoT industrielle