Cisco & Wi-Fi Alliance White Papers: The future of connectivity is here | Wi-Fi NOW Events
A new white paper by Cisco zooms in on the voluminous Wi-Fi 6 technical feature set (yes, by a long shot Wi-Fi 6 is the most complex Wi-Fi standard ever) and fleshes out the details of how Wi-Fi 6 beats any previous Wi-Fi generation by a wide margin in practically every performance category. There is a lot of excellent information in the paper and we don’t have column space to comment on all of it here – but here are two critical performance items we picked up on:
In Wi-Fi 6 the new OFDMA scheme will operate in both uplink and downlink directions, which means that Wi-Fi throughput will no longer quickly deteriorate as a function of the number of connected devices. This is particularly true for the uplink direction where the relative throughput in Wi-Fi 6 will be 2-3 times higher with four or more devices connected to the AP. In the downlink direction the gains will be from +10% to +40% also relative to Wi-Fi 5 (see figure below), says Cisco.