The Wi-Fi Alliance has unveiled the Wi-Fi Certified 6 standard, which is designed to ensure that devices are interoperable and provide consistent security capabilities.

The new standard is based on IEEE 802.11ax technology and is expected to be available in the third quarter of the year. The Wi-Fi Alliance expects the new standard to provide the underlying capability to meet the capacity, coverage, and performance users will demand to enjoy next generation Wi-Fi uses, including streaming ultra high-definition and mission critical business applications by providing higher data rates, increased network capacity, improved performance in congested environments and improved power efficiency.

Wi-Fi Certified 6 Standard

Among the new capabilities are:

• Target wake time (TWT), which significantly improves battery life in Internet of Things (IoT) and other Wi-Fi devices.
• Uplink and downlink orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA), which improves network efficiency and lowers latency for high demand environments
• Multi-user multiple input multiple output (MU-MIMO), which enables additional data to be transferred at a single time, enabling anaccess point to transmit to a larger number of concurrent clients at once
• Transmit beam forming, which provides higher data rates at a given range resulting in improved network capacity
• 1024 quadrature amplitude modulation mode (1024-QAM), which increases throughput in Wi-Fi devices by encoding more data in the same amount of spectrum

“Wi-Fi continues to be a predominant technology for accessing the internet, with a strong history of success,” said Andrew Zignani, ABI Research senior analyst, in a prepared statement. “Wi-Fi Certified 6 will further escalate Wi-Fi’s role, with more than one billion Wi-Fi 6 chipsets expected to be shipped annually in 2022.” “Wi-Fi 6 delivers features to satisfy users’ evolving connectivity needs and to enable more efficiency in the expanding places where users rely on Wi-Fi,” said Edgar Figueroa, president and CEO of the Wi-Fi Alliance