While nobody can say where WiFi might go in the future, the IEEE 802.11ax standard is certainly the next evolution in WiFi, says Marius Steyl, Wireless Alliance Manager at StorTech.
If you consider that more than half of all mobile data is carried over WiFi, according to Gartner, and that this is expected to grow from 52 million terabytes (TBs) in 2015 to 173 million TBs in 2018, the need for faster and more reliable WiFi is clear. Herald the arrival of high efficiency wireless, or 802.11ax.
What is 802.11ax?
Steyl explains: "802.11ax is the next major revision of the 802.11 wireless network standard. It's meant to be faster and more efficient in crowded environments than previous standards."
WiFi has come a long way since the release of 802.11b by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in 1999. It was the first WiFi technology standard to be widely adopted, but was eventually replaced by 802.11g, 802.11n and the current and most popular standard, 802.11ac. Steyl says: "Newer revisions of the standard are usually faster than the one it replaces, and this is also the case with 802.11ax, which has a theoretical speed of 1 201Mb/s per stream compared to 802.11ac at 866Mb/s per stream.
"This jump in speed is not as much as when we jumped from 802.11n, with 150Mb/s per stream, to 802.11ac at 866Mb/s per stream, but this is not the only change that comes with 802.11ax. The biggest advantage comes in the form of network efficiency, particularly in dense deployment scenarios," he says.
The technology
The new standard focuses on providing better real-world speeds by making use of a process called Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA), which breaks up a channel into smaller sub-channels. This provides the access point with the ability to better allocate bandwidth to devices based on their individual bandwidth needs. OFDMA allows up to 30 devices to communicate with the access point on the same channel at once, instead of just one. It also improves on MU-MIMO (multi-user multiple-input and multiple-output) by allowing eight simultaneous streams in both download and upload directions, compared to the four simultaneous streams in only the download direction in the current implementation of MU-MIMO.
Steyl explains: "An access point needs to wait until the air is clear of data frames before it can transmit. Those frames might also be from other networks and hence the more crowded the air-space, the longer the access point will need to wait for an available opening in which to transmit."
Another feature that should vastly improve efficiency is the addition of BSS-colour, which is an identifier added to the frame to indicate which wireless network it came from. By being able to identify frames belonging to other networks, the access points can ignore those frames and transmit sooner.
Target wakeup time (TWT) is another new feature that should help battery-powered 802.11ax capable devices to conserve power by allowing the devices to sleep when there's no need to transmit or receive frames.
The timeframe
Some WiFi manufacturers are already planning to release some devices by mid-2018, but official product certification will start in 2019, with mass adoption expected from 2020.
Not only has the swift development of wireless enabled so many parallel technologies, it has also increased productivity and changed the way we work and play. The future for WiFi looks set to include even more applications and devices, driven by the proliferation of the Internet of things. In addition, the technology is becoming more affordable, which means more people have access to it.
However, more devices, more demand, and more applications also mean more need for security, cautions Steyl, which shouldn't be overlooked in the rush to embrace the new possibilities that come with faster, high-efficiency WiFi.
Sponsored content
StorTech's approach to managed WiFi solutions is very simple. The company understands that WiFi is an essential part of any organisation's digital strategy. Not only delivering the benefits of increased internal productivity, it is also a mechanism for any organisation to get closer to its customers. Additionally, StorTech is in the era of big data and analytics, where it is helping many organisations see the benefits gained through the usage of Wifi data. The approach is simple, use multiple sources of customer information (including WiFi data), analyse customer behaviour, and then use these analyses to better market to, or service, your customer. And finally, to ensure that customer data is protected at all times, the solution includes security.
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