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What Is The Difference Between WiFi 6 And WiFi 5?


Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) wireless Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax) standard is the successor to the IEEE Wi-Fi 5 (802.11ac) standard. Wi-Fi 6 addresses the increasing number of devices in individual networks. Wi-Fi 6 operates in the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands and features improvements in throughput, multiple-device support, and Wi-Fi spectrum efficiency. The following are major features of Wi-Fi 6:

Efficiency and capacity improvements      

 Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiple Access (OFDMA). This feature enables your router and devices to use your bandwidth more efficiently by reducing the time between data transmissions. As a result, more bandwidth is available for other devices. For example, the RAX200 supports several client devices per WiFi band with downlink and uplink OFDMA technology.

 High-bandwidth traffic efficiency with 8-stream Multi-User-Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MU-MIMO). This technology enables your router to communicate with many devices simultaneously. Wi-Fi 6 also allows 8x8 APs to use all eight streams to transmit information.

Note: Downlink MU-MIMO is not new in Wi-Fi 6.

Speed improvements

• Improvements in data speeds and signal encoding. Wi-Fi 6 enables devices to send more data in one transmission, resulting in speed improvements of up to 20%.

• Improvements through higher order modulation (1024-QAM). Higher order modulation increases the efficiency and speed of data transmission on your network. This technology can give up to 25% improvements in speed.

Together, these two features provide up to 40% improvement in connection speeds.

Range improvements

 20MHz-only devices and OFDMAs ability to use smaller subcarriers means such devices can reach longer distances.

Future improvements

 Further improvements through uplink MU-MIMO. Uplink MU-MIMO allows more of your devices to transmit data to your AP, improving network efficiency.

 Better neighborhood, urban, and city-wide WiFi through spatial re-use (BSS color). BSS coloring enables devices operating in the Wi-Fi 6 standard to differentiate between signals from their own network and signals from other networks. This feature increases the efficiency and capacity of your network.    

 Extended battery for mobile and smart home devices with Target Wake Time (TWT). TWT makes communication between your devices and your routers Wi-Fi channels more efficient. Devices that support TWT enter a sleep state until their scheduled wake time. TWT reduces energy consumption and bandwidth use.

 6 GHz spectrum. The development of a 6 GHz band in the future means more unlicensed bands available for high-bandwidth applications.

Note: Not all features are available in all products. Please refer to individual product documentation for more details.

By the way, you can check the price of Xiaomi Mi AX9000 WiFi 6 Rou

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Categories: Routers