Extreme Networks exec: ‘Any new Wi-Fi radio, whether in the consumer or enterprise market, has a Wi-Fi 6 radio in it’
“Wi-Fi is ingrained in our culture,” Extreme Network’s Director of Wireless, Office of the CTO, David Coleman told RCR Wireless News. “You can’t live without it anymore.”
Coleman provided an update on the current state of Wi-Fi 6 and Wi-Fi 6E adoption and detailed how the latest generation of wireless technology differs from what came before.
Where are we in terms of Wi-Fi 6 adoption?
Coleman: Bottom line, Wi-Fi 6 is, believe it or not, about two years old now. Any Wi-Fi radio that comes out, whether in the consumer or enterprise market, is going to have a Wi-Fi 6 radio in it using 802.11ax technology. The bulk of radios coming out right now in laptops, and definitely everything in smartphones, they’re all Wi-Fi 6. We’re there, in terms of implementation. Maybe some IoT devices are still using some of the older technology, but anything in a smartphone or laptop will have a Wi-Fi 6 radio in it.
What is different about Wi-Fi 6 than previous generations of Wi-Fi technology?
Coleman: In the past, there was a focus on getting faster speeds and bigger channels. Wi-Fi 6 kind of changed that because it’s all about better efficiency, making the network more efficient. There are several technical improvements that Wi-Fi 6 introduced, but probably the biggest ones are the two multi-user technologies: OFDMA and Multi-user MIMO.
The one that seems to give us the biggest bang for the buck is OFDMA, which is taking an existing technology and making it available for multi-user communications. To simplify that: In the past, if an access point was talking to multiple iPads, it took turns. Now, it can take a channel and divide that channel into four resource units and send data in these smaller sub-channels to four clients at the same time.
The bulk of Wi-Fi use is very “bursty” and low-bandwidth and this particular technology is good with low-bandwidth applications and leads to better frequency reuse, reduced latency and increased efficiency.
Has Wi-Fi 6 been adopted faster than Wi-Fi 5? Did it go at the pace you expected?
Coleman: That’s hard to say. I think it’s been about the same. Honestly, I thought it would go a little quicker simply because the chipsets vendors were very aggressive. But it really is a generation change and whenever that happens, there are going to be some hiccups along the way, so I would say it’s been about the same in terms of implementation.
But I think that Wi-Fi 6E is going to be faster.
And why is that?
Coleman: Well, first, Wi-Fi 6E just means taking Wi-Fi 6 technology and moving it to a whole new frequency band, 6 GHz, which literally triples the amount of frequency space that we had before. It is pristine, unused unlicensed. Taking the efficiency features of Wi-Fi 6 and combining it with this untouched frequency space is probably the most exciting thing in the past 10-15 years of my career.
Wi-Fi 6E is already finding its way into the consumer marketplace and pretty soon in the enterprise marketplace. Implementation will happen faster simply because the Wi-Fi 6 technology itself is already mature, it’s been around for two years. All they’re doing is porting that over to a new frequency band. They don’t have to focus on all the bugs that a technology itself might have as it’s developed. We’ve already seen, especially on the client side, devices coming faster than with Wi-Fi 6. There’s already a Samsung phone out and an Intel chipset that’s already in about 30 different laptops, for example.
What is a Wi-Fi trend that you’re following?
Coleman: Moving forward, the trend will be application-driven, especially when we get into extremely high-bandwidth applications. Making VR and AR applications untethered, for instance. There was no way to do that before, but with this new frequency space, I think you’ll start seeing a lot of development of high-bandwidth applications like that being used over Wi-Fi.
