Seize the wireless advantage with WiFi 6

By Ian Hocking

It’s amazing how much we have all come to depend on WiFi in recent years, both as workers and consumers. Untethered from blue cables, users are now competing for wireless bandwidth with temperature, lighting and location sensors, as well as surveillance cameras and audio-video equipment.

At the same time, video traffic is increasing rapidly, with social, collaboration, telemedicine, eLearning and other applications generating enormous uplink traffic. No wonder many networks are beginning to struggle.

Enter WiFi 6 – the new standard, also known as 802.11ax.

So what does WiFi 6 offer?                                                                                     

What’s exciting about WiFi 6 is how it manages the traffic, and also how much it can handle – up to four times more than the current WiFi 5 standard.

This makes it a real game changer in environments where latency-sensitive voice and video traffic shares airspace with IoT and other devices that are constantly sending small data packets that have the potential to slow the network.

WiFi 6 solves some of today’s biggest WiFi challenges: performance and the increasing density of devices and diversity of applications.

Think of it as adding more lanes to a freeway, with each of these lanes now being for dual occupancy vehicles. Instead of single drivers competing with each other for space, the use of carpools or buses makes more efficient use of the freeway and ultimately relieves congestion.

Improve your battery life

Another advantage of WiFi 6 is its ability to help improve device contention and the battery life of devices. A feature called Target Wake Time (TWT) lets devices remain inactive until it’s their turn to transmit data.

This improves the battery life of smartphones, tablets and IoT devices, and ensures less congestion, energy savings and an overall better user experience.

With WiFi 6, IoT handling is also enhanced by giving low-power, low-bandwidth devices such as sensors their own channel – similar to providing a dedicated bike lane – that stops low-bandwidth traffic interfering with latency-sensitive traffic like video.

For those still relying on WiFi 5 or even earlier iterations, a move to WiFi 6 offers many advantages, not least of which is the fact that this standard is now mature, having been first ratified in 2019.  

Not convinced?

Ask yourself the following questions and see:

· Is the proliferation in the number of WiFi connected devices affecting the performance of your WiFi?

· Can you ensure all users have a good experience on your network across your entire premises?

· Are you introducing applications whose bandwidth and latency requirements will not be met by legacy WiFi technology?

· Do you have visibility into the WiFi user experience and the associated impact on productivity?

At Optus Enterprise, we’re excited about the potential WiFi 6 offers, and have created a white paper to explain what it is, its many features and advantages, use cases in a number of verticals, the power behind WiFi analytics platform and what you need to consider when migrating to WiFi 6.

Download the WiFi 6 white paper here.

Find out more

To discuss how Optus can help you, contact your Optus Account Manager or call the Optus Enterprise hotline on 1300 654 989.