11 votes

New Wi-Fi 6 certification is officially released, up to 3x faster than 802.11ac

8 comments

  1. spit-evil-olive-tips
    Link
    TP-Link's page on it has some approachable infographics on the new features: https://www.tp-link.com/us/wifi6/ Digging into technical details, there's the Wikipedia page on 802.11ax. Notable...

    TP-Link's page on it has some approachable infographics on the new features: https://www.tp-link.com/us/wifi6/

    Digging into technical details, there's the Wikipedia page on 802.11ax. Notable things that stand out to me:

    • Uses the same 2.4ghz / 5ghz spectrum as current wifi, but is future-proofed to support other bands from 1 to 7 ghz when licenses become available.

    • WPA3 (which is technically its own standard, so can be implemented on 802.11ac devices, but it's required by 802.11ax) will be a huge improvement to wireless security. Right now, if you have an "open" wireless network, there's no encryption at all of the traffic between clients and the access point. WPA3 adds "Opportunistic Wireless Encryption" which allows both endpoints, if they support it, to encrypt traffic even with an unauthenticated access point.

    • Another change in WPA3 is that for Personal / pre-shared key networks (aka just about every home network out there) the initial negotiation has been updated to use SAE which includes a Diffie-Hellman key exchange. Right now with WPA2 there's a theoretical attack which would involve an attacker passively intercepting a lot of your encrypted traffic then running an offline attack to try to recover your pre-shared key.

    • Target Wake Time looks interesting - seems like it would have the most benefit for IoT devices, phones not actively being used, etc. Allows the AP and the client to agree that the client needs to wake up less frequently in order to participate in the network, which could help improve battery life significantly.

    4 votes
  2. [7]
    JXM
    Link
    I've been using a wireless AC mesh router system for nearly 2 years now and I see zero reasons to upgrade in the near future. Wifi speeds and coverage have been faster than anyone's internet...

    I've been using a wireless AC mesh router system for nearly 2 years now and I see zero reasons to upgrade in the near future. Wifi speeds and coverage have been faster than anyone's internet speeds for quite a while now, so unless it offers significantly better performance in a saturated area (like an apartment building), I don't know why people would upgrade.

    Or if you're transferring multi-gigabyte files, it might be good.

    2 votes
    1. [3]
      Greg
      Link Parent
      You'd be surprised! Gigabit fibre isn't entirely uncommon in big cities, and although ac is theoretically a little faster than that, with real world devices & overheads you can easily lose a...

      Wifi speeds and coverage have been faster than anyone's internet speeds for quite a while now

      You'd be surprised! Gigabit fibre isn't entirely uncommon in big cities, and although ac is theoretically a little faster than that, with real world devices & overheads you can easily lose a couple of hundred Mbps from there to WiFi.

      If the new standard is more like 8Gbps peak then you can go back to being reasonably confident that any supported device will have plenty of bandwidth to spare even outside lab conditions.

      4 votes
      1. [2]
        JXM
        Link Parent
        Wireless AC can reach speeds of 1-2 Gb/s, if you're not going through a bunch of concrete walls. Wikipedia also has a nice list of average bandwidth per country that shows Singapore as the fastest...

        Wireless AC can reach speeds of 1-2 Gb/s, if you're not going through a bunch of concrete walls.

        Wikipedia also has a nice list of average bandwidth per country that shows Singapore as the fastest with an average of 135 Mb/s.

        I don't live anywhere with gigabit fiber. Do people actually get gigabit speeds during peak usage time?

        1 vote
        1. onyxleopard
          (edited )
          Link Parent
          It depends on so many factors. I just tried ten samples on speedtest.net and it’s highly variable even with a couple samples run against the same servers only a few minutes apart. $ seq 10 | while...

          It depends on so many factors.

          I just tried ten samples on speedtest.net and it’s highly variable even with a couple samples run against the same servers only a few minutes apart.

          $ seq 10 | while read _; do speedtest | rg '^(Download|Upload)'; done
          Download: 139.71 Mbit/s
          Upload: 8.09 Mbit/s
          Download: 97.04 Mbit/s
          Upload: 15.92 Mbit/s
          Download: 81.98 Mbit/s
          Upload: 12.02 Mbit/s
          Download: 113.80 Mbit/s
          Upload: 19.42 Mbit/s
          Download: 137.11 Mbit/s
          Upload: 15.26 Mbit/s
          Download: 101.38 Mbit/s
          Upload: 16.15 Mbit/s
          Upload: 13.49 Mbit/s
          Download: 80.06 Mbit/s
          Upload: 12.20 Mbit/s
          Download: 111.14 Mbit/s
          Upload: 13.10 Mbit/s
          Download: 130.96 Mbit/s
          Upload: 24.30 Mbit/s
          # Download
          $ pbpaste | rg '^Down' | cut -f 2 -d ' ' | datamash --header-out min 1 max 1 mean 1 sstdev 1 | column -t
          min(field-1)  max(field-1)  mean(field-1)    sstdev(field-1)
          80.06         139.71        110.35333333333  22.347717444965
          # Upload
          $ pbpaste | rg '^Up' | cut -f 2 -d ' ' | datamash --header-out min 1 max 1 mean 1 sstdev 1 | column -t
          min(field-1)  max(field-1)  mean(field-1)  sstdev(field-1)
          8.09          24.3          14.995         4.4549753709258
          

          I’m supposedly paying for symmetric "Up to 940/880 Mbps (Fios Gigabit Connection)" from Verizon in the northeastern US. The speedtest.net samples were on a desktop machine on a 802.11ac (5 GHz) network (using an Eero hub router) in a relatively uncrowded apartment complex.

          5 votes
    2. babypuncher
      (edited )
      Link Parent
      WiFi 6 is less about increased speed and more about reliability and security. Pending FCC licenses, WiFi 6 greatly expands the available bands spanning from 1GHz to 7 GHz. This is a huge deal for...

      WiFi 6 is less about increased speed and more about reliability and security.

      Pending FCC licenses, WiFi 6 greatly expands the available bands spanning from 1GHz to 7 GHz. This is a huge deal for office buildings and high density residential areas. On the 2.4GHz spectrum commonly used right now, there are only three non-overlapping channels. This means access points and devices in crowded areas have to fight tons of interference from other devices on other networks nearby. Many non-WiFi wireless consumer devices also operate within the same 2.4Ghz spectrum, creating even more interference. 5GHz mitigates this to an extent, but has its own issues penetrating building materials.

      WPA3 enables opportunistic encryption between access points and clients even on open networks, preventing people from easily sniffing going over the air on public networks.

      Unfortunately speed is the only metric that is easy to market to consumers, so that's what gets plastered on all the marketing hype.

      2 votes
    3. zaarn
      Link Parent
      Wifi has problems other than Speed. It can get very decent throughput but the latency and loss rates are usually less than ideal. A copper cable between two computer will have a fairly good...

      Wifi has problems other than Speed. It can get very decent throughput but the latency and loss rates are usually less than ideal. A copper cable between two computer will have a fairly good latency with little deviation from average. A wifi connection will at times generate hundred if not thousand times the latency average or drop packages outright. Of course most modern protocols and applications can handle this, so you don't notice.

      In part this is something you can't really fix with current Wifi since detecting collisions is impossible. At the moment, Wifi uses CSMA/CA (Carrier Sense multiple access/Collision Avoidance), which means while sending you can't detect collisions and when you're not sending you try to guess the best time for sending without collision. Wifi 6 uses OFDMA (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access), which removes the problem entirely because devices get a frequency slot to send in (and possibly a time slot), a collision isn't a problem for devices on the same network anymore. It is more complex but wifi chips are a lot more complex now so it's not an issue to deal with the vastly increased complexity of OFDMA.

      2 votes
    4. moocow1452
      Link Parent
      If Gaming Streaming Services or Local Streaming to Devices takes off, WiFi 6 might be a recommended buy for support.

      If Gaming Streaming Services or Local Streaming to Devices takes off, WiFi 6 might be a recommended buy for support.

      1 vote