Kevin Fitchard at GigaOm lays out where Wi-Fi is headed. Now that the second wave of 802.11ac Wi-Fi equipment is hitting the market, new pans are happening. The Wi-Fi Alliance and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) have begun to look ahead to 802.11ac successor. This time around, the wireless industry is turning its focus away from overall network capacity to real connection speed to the device.
Mr. Fitchard explains that the huge gigabit-plus numbers often attributed to 802.11ac can be a bit misleading. They represent the overall capacity a Wi-Fi network can support. For instance, 1.3 Gbps in today’s most advanced routers, but only in the rarest of circumstances would any single device actually be able to connect at such high rates. The author argues that 802.11ac technologies improvements will be able to pack more high-speed connections into a single router and take advantage of bigger swaths of unlicensed spectrum.
Fair share
However, individual connections are still peaking at just over 300 Mbps. Assuming the broadband connection that can even support those speeds. Typical connection speeds are far slower. 
With 802.11ax, though, wireless engineers are making sure the individual, not just the network, gets its fair share of attention, said Greg Ennis, VP of Technology for the Wi-Fi Alliance.
Though the IEEE is still in the early stages of developing the 801.11ax specifications (we likely won’t have a ratified standard until at least 2018), it has begun setting priorities for the new technology, the Wi-Fi Alliance’s Ennis said. And at the top of that list is a 4X increase in speed to the device, possibly pushing individual device connections into the gigabit range.
MIMO-OFDA
GigaOm speculates that the IEEE is hoping to do this with a new radio technology called MIMO-OFDA. MIMO, or multiple input-multiple output, uses multiple antennas to send multiple streams of data to the same or different devices, while OFDA is a variant of the orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) technologies used in 4G mobile and earlier Wi-Fi standards. The idea is to create a more powerful and efficient radio that can shove more bits into the same transmission. That would create a bigger data pipe to the individual devices, which would, in turn, add up to greater overall network capacity and better Wi-Fi performance even in the sketchiest of conditions, Mr. Ennis said. “The goal here is not just to increase average throughput, but the average throughput users would actually see in the real world, even in the densest environments,” Ennis said.
Chinese equipment maker Huawei (002502) — which is heading up the IEEE 802.11ax working group — is already doing trials of MIMO-OFDA systems and it’s hitting 10.53 Gbps in the lab using Wi-Fi’s traditional 5 GHz band. Whether that means a 10 Gbps to your smartphone or tablet remains to be seen, but it hardly seems relevant given it’s difficult to comprehend what any device could possibly do with a 10 Gbps connection (much less a home broadband connection capable of supporting a high-capacity link).
Faster simultaneous Wi-Fi connections
But if 802.11ax lives up to its promise, the author says it should be able to squeeze a lot more and a lot faster simultaneous connections out of a single router or hotspot, which would mean a far better experience for everyone on a crowded network. Though the IEEE won’t ratify 802.11ax until 2018 or later, we might see the Wi-Fi Alliance certify “draft-ax” devices and equipment beforehand just as we saw “draft-n” and “draft-ac” devices before their respective 802.11 standards were finalized. It all depends on how far the wireless industry has progressed with the underlying technology in the coming years, Ennis said. A range comparison for different Wi-Fi technologies. And long before we see the “ax” suffix stamped onto any gadget or router, other combinations of the Wi-Fi alphabet will make an appearance.
The Alliance will begin certifying the first 802.11ad, or WiGig, devices next year, supporting extremely close range but very high-capacity links between gadgets and peripherals. A bit further down the road is 802.11ah, which will take Wi-Fi to the 900 MHz band where it will provide narrowband but long-range connectivity to the internet of things.
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Techie wireless alphabet – IEEE, N, AC, AD, AH, AX, MIMO, OFDM, EI, EIO, O!
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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.
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