Wifi 6 XV3-8 on our website www.dsnasia.net

Hi Guys,

Wow, on our website, www.dsnasia.net is really showing a huge traffic increase on any pages that bring up Wifi 6.  The big question is what will be the next driver for wifi growth?  Up to now, it has been video, but those limits are now baked in solutions, what's next?

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<stay tuned to the Cambium partner webinar invite coming up next week.  hint, hint, hint>

streaming video has been on a rapid growth for several years.  Remember, back in 2013/14, youtube had some promo videos in 1080P, but today it seems everything is available in 1080P, or 4K.  So, yes, high bitrate video is baked into a lot of the network architectures.  Three are a few things I'm looking for in the coming years, but they relate more to the quantity of devices than the single bitrate of a particular device (side note:  compression is the secret sauce powering higher bitrate video).

  1. always on, always connected, always transmitting social media.  Have you seen the Amazon Prime show "The Feed"?  It seems we are there today, but lacking the implant.  This means that any network can be consumed by large numbers of low bitrate devices.  This is ideal for 11ax with OFDMA.  All those social media background updates are not time sensitive and low bitrate (64Kbps average, but spike to ~1Mbps at times).  OFDMA splits the spectrum into small resource units (RU) where each RU is about 2MHz.  then, the RU are assigned to devices by the AP.  This will be allow dozens of devices to all talk at the smae time, at low bitrate and the AP happily takes it all in.  A side benefit of OFDMA:  accumulated power when mulitple devices are transmitting upstream with OFDMA.  this will give higher rate at range and better connection stability.
  2. hybrid education where students learn from home 3 days a week, and school classroom 2 days (this might be a North America centric thing however)
  3. Enterprise IOT devices built with 11ax radios.  This will not happen until the chipset cost come down, so not happening right now.  battery operated IOT (environmental sensors/actuators/entry/security/people counting) will have extended batter life (3x to 4x is reasonable) than current crop.  However, also have to note that BLE 5.0 will be a competitive technology in this IOT space for similar reasons
  4. rate-at-range.  rate-at-range.  rate-at-range.  That's another one where I'm looking for improvements in the network.  There are two key techologies to watch:  a) downstream preamble 3dB boost and packet duplication, and b) upstream power accumlation with OFDMA.  These two techs can deliver better MCS data rates at the same range where 11ac would have long ago fallen back to 11n rates.

note I keep i saying "watch for".  the truth is that there are not enough 11ax clients around to get some realworld data - but - we are now conducting a lot of realworld tests and the results are very exciting.  for example, recently we did several tests with 11ac and 11ax clients.  here's a summary:

11ac AP > 11ac 3x3 client

11ax AP > same 11ac 3x3 client

test results:  <come to the webinar>

11ax AP > 11ac 2x2 phone

same 11ax AP > 11ax 2x2 phone

test results:  <come to the webinar>

sorry for the teaser, but I hope we dropped some konwledge that you can use.

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