Wi-Fi 6 and Why It’s Important

There’s a lot going on now, and for this week at least, I didn’t want to write another remote work or WFH type of blog. So I figured I’d take a look at some new technology that we’d all be using someday soon in your house or your enterprise. So I zeroed in on Wi-Fi 6 as a good thing to write about.

If you haven’t already, you’re going to start hearing about Wi-Fi 6. Wi-Fi previously had naming schemes like 802.11 and some letters. It was pretty techy. But the Wi-Fi alliance decided to make it simpler so the new version announced last year is called Wi-Fi 6 (would have been 802.11ax), and the next one will be Wi-Fi 7, etc.

To use it, you need a Wi-Fi 6 device (like an Apple iPhone 11 or a Samsung Galaxy Note 10) and you’ll need a Wi-Fi 6 capable router.

But why use it in first place? Faster speed obviously is a key thing. But with more and more households having multiple Wi-Fi devices (right now, a US household has an average of 11 connected devices) with no end in sight for the increase, slower internet could occur if all of these devices are on at one time. Probably a lot of readers have noticed this – I certainly have when all my kids are home at the same time. And you may have noticed this is you have a lot of people working at home right now. A Wi-Fi 6 router is designed to help data flow to each of the devices, effectively keeping the speed going.

And if it can do that at home, and at a public venue (an issue I’m sure we’ve all experienced!), it can certainly help at work, with many of us now simply connected via Wi-Fi instead of an ethernet cable.

There are also improvements to battery life and security.

So we’ll start to see this coming into work. You may get questions about it or may be wondering about it. First, we need to be on devices that support it. And then the infrastructure the devices connect to need to support it. And then we’ll be using it.

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