What Wi-Fi standards are coming next?

Wi-Fi standards are focusing not only on faster and more efficient Wi-Fi (although that continues to be part of the standard’s evolution), but in expanding Wi-Fi’s use in different spectra and for specific use cases.
Wi-Fi standards originate with the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ 802.11 working group, with interoperability certification coming from Wi-Fi Alliance, and the Wireless Broadband Alliance focused on next-generation, carrier Wi-Fi focused initiatives.
Among the current Wi-Fi standards work that is underway:
802.11ac Wave 2: Wi-Fi Alliance plans to start certifying second-wave features for 802.11ac this year, including multi-user MIMO. MU-MIMO brings new capabilities, including beamforming and support for multiple streams for multiple users, enabling more network density; and the use of channel sizes up to 160 MHz. Currently, 11ac is seeing healthy adoption in the enterprise, though consumer adoption has been slower. According to the latest numbers from IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly WLAN Tracker, 802.11ac accounts for 54.5% of dependent access point unit shipments and 71.3% of revenues. For full-year 2015, 11ac dependent access points made up 51% of shipments and 66.1% of dependent access point revenues.
802.11ad, or WiGig: WiGig, or gigabit Wi-Fi, promises ultra-fast speeds over short distances for use cases such as 4K video screen mirroring, small cell fronthaul and backhaul and wireless docking.  Strategy Analytics expects to see rapid growth in WiGig in due to an interoperability agreement between Intel and Qualcomm which ensures that the new devices with 11ad which start to ship this year will work together, thereby boosting rapid adoption and driving demand for infrastructure. The new standard supports multi-gigabit speeds over short distances using high-band spectrum (60 GHz), with very low latency, high capacity and increased battery efficiency because of the speeds at which it works — many of the characteristics expected of 5G technologies. Christopher Taylor, director of RF and wireless components research at Strategy Analytics, wrote in a recent report on WiGig that the technology can enable a two-hour, HD movie to be uploaded or downloaded in about 12 seconds. Taylor expects that WiGig technology will likely make up about 10% of Wi-Fi routers and infrastructure by 2020. WiGig is commonly expected to be a complement to other Wi-Fi technologies rather than support standalone networks, although Facebook recently announced that it is working on development of WiGig-based terrestrial networks.
802.11ah or Wi-Fi HaLow: 802.11ah focuses on bringing an orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) physical layer to 900 MHz (but excludes the TV white spaces). The commercial name for 802.11ah is Wi-Fi HaLow, announced in February, and it is largely expected to serve wearables and sensor networks for smart home, smart city and other IoT applications. Wi-Fi Alliance expects that many devices with HaLow will also operate at 5 GHz and 2.4 GHs. Wi-Fi HaLow is not expected to be available until the end of next year, but the technology may get a headstart in adoption because it would likely be included as part of a multi-technology Wi-Fi chipset with 11ac, HaLow and potentially WiGig as well.
Sigfox’s  IoT network operates in the same band as 11ah, setting up specialized IoT competition.
802.11af will enable Wi-Fi to operate in the TV white spaces by relying on channel bonding and cognitive-radio-based avoidance of primary users. The WBA says in its most recent annual report that both 11af and 11ah are “likely to be targeted primarily at low-power wide area applications,” including rural broadband in the case of 11af.
802.11ax: Seen as the major successor to 802.11ac, 11ax is expected to deliver gigabit speeds to the end user, support very dense deployments in large venues, improve power consumption and maintain backwards compatibility with legacy Wi-Fi technologies. Huawei has already demonstrated a system based on its proposals for 11ax which was able to achieve speeds of more than 10 Gbps and says that although the final standard isn’t expected until 2019, chip sets could be ready as soon as 2018.
 
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