WiFi 6 Certification has begun, several prominent pre-certification devices now certified including Intel AX200

[Alex Atkin UK]

 

Quote

The Samsung Galaxy Note10 and the Ruckus R750 are the world’s first Wi-Fi CERTIFIED 6 smartphone and access point, respectively. Wi-Fi Alliance expects most leading phones and access points will soon support the latest generation of Wi-Fi. The first products designated Wi-Fi CERTIFIED 6 which comprise the test bed for certification include:

• Broadcom® BCM4375
• Broadcom® BCM43698
• Broadcom® BCM43684
• Cypress CYW 89650 Auto-Grade Wi-Fi 6 Certified
• Intel® Wi-Fi 6 (Gig+) AX200 (for PCs)
• Intel® Home Wi-Fi Chipset WAV600 Series (for routers and gateways)
• Marvell 88W9064 (4x4) Wi-Fi 6 Dual-Band STA
• Marvell 88W9064 (4x4) + 88W9068 (8x8) Wi-Fi 6 Concurrent Dual-Band AP
• Qualcomm® Networking Pro 1200 Platform
• Qualcomm® FastConnect 6800 Wi-Fi 6 Mobile Connectivity Subsystem
• Ruckus R750 Wi-Fi 6 Access Point

• For more information on Wi-Fi CERTIFIED 6 please visit: https://www.wi-fi.org/discover-wi-fi/wi-fi-certified-6

https://www.wi-fi.org/news-events/newsroom/wi-fi-certified-6-delivers-new-wi-fi-era

 

It seemed likely seeing as every motherboard manufacturer seemed to be choosing the Intel AX200 as their WiFi 6 solution, but its still a relief to see it full certified now.

 

Now we just need to see more certified Access Points come to market so we can actually use it.

[Eniqmatic]

Nice, I bought an AX200 as an upgrade for my laptop a few weeks ago, I didn't really care if it was certified at the time but nice to see it is!

[williamcll]

Have we even saturated AC wifi yet? I don't think most devices can even break 2Gbps on wifi.

[LAwLz]

1 minute ago, williamcll said:

Have we even saturated AC wifi yet? I don't think most devices can even break 2Gbps on wifi.

I doubt any device can reach 2Gbps on 802.11ac, but WiFi 6/802.11ax isn't really about pushing for faster speeds.

It's about improving speeds in congested networks. So if you got 10 devices on WiFi then if you got ax they won't affect each other as much as if you were using ac.

 

The theoretical speed doesn't increase much from ac to ax, but the real world speed should improve, as well as improve latency.

[RedRound2]

19 minutes ago, huilun02 said:

Ah. Paying more to get a sticker on your product. Another mess of a standard like USB C. 

Um, i'm not sure if there is a certification fee for wifi, but this has been a thing even before Wifi 6. It's only now that they renamed to something more sensible that normal consumers would understand.

 

USB-C is a mess because of the bazillion standards it supports, since manufacturers have the flexibility to cherry pick what to support and what not to support. They can be anywhere from shitty usb 2.0 with 5V cable to a 40 Gbps 100W cable. And also at one point there was a proposal to pass on analog audio through USB C, but who knows what happened to that

[Alex Atkin UK]

The problem with WiFi is most devices only support 2x2 MIMO so you end up brute forcing speed to chose devices by taking up a wider channel width such as 80Mhz or even 160Mhz, rather than getting more out of what you have with a higher number of transmit/receive streams.

The wider the channel width, the less efficient, less range and higher the chance of crosstalk/intereference spoiling your day (not to mention the impact on everyone else trying to do the same.

So in the real world AX/WiFi 6 may very well result in better speeds, if it means you can use 40Mhz channel width rather than 80Mhz channel width, so you get a cleaner signal with better range.  There are also the improvements to 2.4Ghz which didn't get any speed/efficiency improvements since 802.11n/WiFi 4.