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What’s the difference between Wi-Fi 6 and Wi-Fi 5

ztwesc's picture
Submitted by ztwesc on Mon, 10/12/2020 - 00:12

Wi-Fi Alliance was established in 1999. After more than 20 years of development, at the end of 2018, Wi-Fi Alliance announced that it will change the naming method of the Wi-Fi standard, and will no longer use the 802.11 electronic engineering terminology. The new generation of Wi-Fi 6 belongs to the sixth generation of wireless LAN technology. What is the difference between Wi-Fi 6 and Wi-Fi 5?

What’s the difference between WI-FI 6 and WI-FI 5?

List of Wi-Fi naming conventions:

802.11ax = Wi-Fi 6

802.11ac = Wi-Fi 5

802.11n = Wi-Fi 4

Compared with previous generations of Wi-Fi technology, the new generation of Wi-Fi 6 is mainly characterized by faster speed, lower latency, larger capacity, more security, and more power saving.

Wi-Fi 6 is faster

Compared with the previous generation of 802.11 ac Wi-Fi 5, the maximum transmission rate of Wi-Fi 6 has increased from the former 3.5Gbps to 9.6Gbps, and the theoretical speed has been increased by nearly 3 times. Of course, this rate is only the theoretical maximum, depending on the number of spatial data streams and the number of wireless signal channels.

Wi-Fi 6 has lower latency

Wi-Fi 6 not only improves the upload and download rate, but also greatly improves the network congestion situation, allowing more devices to connect to the wireless network and having a consistent high-speed connection experience, which is mainly due to the new technology that simultaneous support uplink and downlink MU-MIMO and OFDMA.

Wi-Fi 6 has more capacity

Wi-Fi 6 also introduced the BSS Coloring coloring mechanism, labeling each device connected to the network, and adding corresponding tags to its data. When transmitting data, there is a corresponding address, which is directly transmitted to the place without confusion.

Wi-Fi 6 is more secure

If Wi-Fi 6 (wireless router) equipment needs to pass the Wi-Fi Alliance standards, it must adopt WPA 3 security protocol, which is more secure.

Wi-Fi 6 saves more power
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Wi-Fi 6 introduces TARget Wake Time (TWT) technology, which allows the device and wireless router to actively plan communication time, reduce the use of wireless network antennas and signal search time, which means that it can reduce power consumption to a certain extent and improve device lifetime.