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Wi-Fi 6 will change your home network connectivity forever

The long-anticipated release of the newest Wi-Fi standard 802.11ax or Wi-Fi 6 is finally upon us and here’s why you should be excited about it. Today’s households are dealing with an increasing number of connected devices and a rising demand for greater bandwidth from streaming video, audio and online gaming.

Many homes also have smart home devices such as IP cameras, voice assistants, smart thermostats and appliances, which all need a constant connection to the network. With the introduction of Wi-Fi 6, the future of connectivity looks a whole lot brighter.

This new standard in wireless connectivity offers a huge performance leap for applications like video streaming, gaming, smart home automation and video chatting. Wi-Fi 6 gives you faster wireless experiences, with up to 40% higher peak data rates for a single device.

Ultimately, as you connect more devices in your home, like upcoming PCs with Intel Wi-Fi 6 (Gig+), you can be confident that your network performance can keep up. Wi-Fi 6 is designed to give you a smoother and more enjoyable wireless experience by opening up more available channels, supporting more simultaneous streams per user and lowering interference.

One of the most exciting features that characterise Wi-Fi 6 is Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiple-Access (OFDMA). Essentially, OFDMA allows multiple signals or transmissions to be sent at the same time using data packet bundling and scheduling. The shorter wait time between transmissions will improve your bandwidth performance with more speed and less interruptions.

In addition to network capacity improvements, OFDMA technology also increases:

- Battery life: Battery-powered devices finish transmitting and receiving data quicker, thereby allowing the device to “sleep” and save more battery power.

- Network Range: Typically, using smaller sub-channels for small data packets makes it possible for clients to reach farther by increasing the transmission power.

- Network Efficiency: Devices no longer use the entire frequency bandwidth for data transmission, resulting in a faster, more efficient Wi-Fi network.

With up to 12 Wi-Fi streams, increased bandwidth, and faster encoding via multi-user, multiple input, multiple output (MU-MIMO) and 1024 QAM, Wi-Fi 6 delivers far greater speeds more effectively. MU-MIMO allows your router to stream or send information to multiple devices simultaneous, whereas traditional routers are only able to serve one device at a time.

Wi-Fi 6 will boost your total network capacity and reliability, presenting you with new opportunities for speed, performance and capacity for wireless connectivity in your home. This guarantees that the experience of lag or buffering is reduced during online gaming or streaming Ultra HD 8K/4K.

There are already several Wi-Fi 6 routers available if you would like to pre-empt the flood of Wi-Fi 6 devices set to be released later this year. This will ensure consistent performance when several different types of devices are connected to your router at the same time. Wi-Fi 6 is backward compatible with previous Wi-Fi standards.

To make the most of the higher speeds and greater bandwidth for the broad range of household network needs, Netgear has released a new family of routers. This range features the industry’s latest Wi-Fi 6 standard with four times increased data capacity to handle today and tomorrow’s growing home network. The new Nighthawk Wi-Fi 6 routers will make sure that you’re prepared for this major technology shift to faster connectivity and greater capacity to handle the many devices now connected in the home.

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