Faster Wi-Fi: Intel 802.11ax chipsets arrive this year

midian182

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As more of us pack our homes with an increasing number of connected devices, faster and more reliable wireless networks have become vital. But the next generation Wi-Fi standard, IEEE 802.11ax, is expected to ease these congestion woes.

Intel has announced that in 2018, it “will expand its home Wi-Fi portfolio with new 802.11ax chipsets for mainstream 2x2 and 4x4 home routers and gateways for cable, xDSL, fiber and consumer retail devices.”

The new standard brings a slew of improvements over its predecessor, 802.11ac. It offers 40 percent faster peak data transfer rates, moving from a maximum 433Mbps to 600Mbps, but the more significant focus is on congested networks, where it should improve average throughput for each user by at least four times; this is achieved partly by sending data to specific devices, rather than flooding an area with signals. Additionally, 802.11ax will increase network efficiency and extend the battery life of client devices.

To aid manufacturers with the transition to the new standard, designs based on the 802.11ac infrastructure chipset—the Intel Home Wi-Fi Chipset WAV500 series—can upgrade to 802.11ax “with no change to the host SoC.” Moreover, the new Wi-Fi chipsets are backward compatible with older Wi-Fi technologies to support a wide range of devices.

While the promise of consumer retail devices with the new 802.11ax chipsets in 2018 sounds exciting, mass adoption of the new standard isn’t expected to take place until product certification begins next year, and even then, it will take a few months before certified products start arriving. A Wi-Fi Alliance spokesperson told The Verge that certification “is typically an inflection point toward broader industry adoption.”

Expect to see a number of 802.11ax chipsets from firms other than Intel at CES 2018. At last year's IFA conference, Asus showed off its pre-certification, 802.11ax RT-AX88U router, which has a 4,804Mbps transfer speed over the 5GHz band.

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Wasn't MU-MIMO supposed to reduce all the network congestion? Why hasnt that caught on?
Because it's a marketing joke. The fact is none of this technology improves range from a single AP or resolves upstream issues. You basically purchase a $300 router that has amazing throughput to another $300 router six feet away...or buy a $10 ethernet cable for even faster throughput.

https://www.smallnetbuilder.com/wireless/wireless-features/33100-why-you-don-t-need-mu-mimo
 
I don't know who really thinks that the current AC is insufficient... Perhaps mainly those who can make money by pushing the "new" standard to consumers.

My 3-year old Macbook Pro connects to my AC router at 867Mbits at all times, which shares a 250Mbit Internet connection. For home users, it is hard to fathom who or why would need more.

At those speeds I have my PC broadcast 4K videos from YouTube, while I do a lot of surfing online, all without any lag.
 
which shares a 250Mbit Internet connection
Even more so when you are stuck with a 10Mbit Internet connection. From my perspective WAN connection is the only concern over wireless and that is as you say bottle-necked by ISP connection rate. With all LAN/wLAN connections, I prefer using USB devices.
 
I never bother with 802.11ac also known as VHOP - Very High Out Put. Where as 802.11n HOP High Out Put would do it for me. 5GHz band pretty quick. Better routers support more mbps. Most did 72 mbps and some did 144 mbps for WiFi. Sure if your ISP has you stuck at 10 mbps down and 2 mbps for internet. So why do you need to speed so much more on router for VHOP. I was paying only $14.99 for 10 mbps down and 2 mbps and just found out after testing I was beef-up to 30 mbps and 5 mbps for $14.99 a month. I am not complaining so let them give me more for less. 802.11ax sounds nice but at what cost for us all to upgrade everything to support that. Look how long it took cell phone makers to start to support 802.11ac. 802.11n @ 40Hz on 5GHz is good enough and 802.11n @ 20Hz on 2.4GHz good enough. 6 ANT on one AP and 6 ANT on another AP is what I do here. Just keep them cool with USB laptop fan that's it. I only have one that is SmartWiF so I can use android app on my Motorola Moto Z2 Force which is set on 5GHz @ 40Hz 802.11n that does support 802.11ac, but I not buying one if I don't need too.
 
I don't know who really thinks that the current AC is insufficient... Perhaps mainly those who can make money by pushing the "new" standard to consumers.

My 3-year old Macbook Pro connects to my AC router at 867Mbits at all times, which shares a 250Mbit Internet connection. For home users, it is hard to fathom who or why would need more.

At those speeds I have my PC broadcast 4K videos from YouTube, while I do a lot of surfing online, all without any lag.


While I think the premise of your statement is on point, "connecting" to your router at 867 Mbps does not equal 867 Mbps of throughput.

For the most part, 802.11 AC is usually sufficient for internet traffic. It can become a bottleneck for local traffic.
 
While I think the premise of your statement is on point, "connecting" to your router at 867 Mbps does not equal 867 Mbps of throughput.

I'm aware of that, but I believe 867Mbit of WiFi is utterly sufficient to cover 100% of a 250Mbit Internet connection.
 
While I think the premise of your statement is on point, "connecting" to your router at 867 Mbps does not equal 867 Mbps of throughput.

I'm aware of that, but I believe 867Mbit of WiFi is utterly sufficient to cover 100% of a 250Mbit Internet connection.
But only for 1 device.... If you have a PS4, PC, Laptops, iPads, Cell phones all connecting at the same time.... nice to have more :)
 
While I think the premise of your statement is on point, "connecting" to your router at 867 Mbps does not equal 867 Mbps of throughput.

I'm aware of that, but I believe 867Mbit of WiFi is utterly sufficient to cover 100% of a 250Mbit Internet connection.

OK, let me play devil's advocate.
Imagine a centralized location for movies and audio on your network. Now, stream a movie to your smart TV while downloading torrents on your PC and still have bandwidth for your laptop and cell phone. That is just assuming there is a single user. Picture a household with several connections, maybe 1 each for mom, son and daughter in addition to dad's aforementioned connection. Do you still think it is sufficient?
 
But only for 1 device.... If you have a PS4, PC, Laptops, iPads, Cell phones all connecting at the same time.... nice to have more :)
I don't exactly know where you are going with this. So let me assume you are referring to the Internet connection. Do you honestly think a 867Mbit Acess Point (AP) will not keep up with 2 dozen devices, all of which are sharing a 250Mbit Internet connection? And that's not to mention people who also have a few Ethernet connected devices taking a share.
 
I don't exactly know where you are going with this. So let me assume you are referring to the Internet connection. Do you honestly think a 867Mbit Acess Point (AP) will not keep up with 2 dozen devices, all of which are sharing a 250Mbit Internet connection? And that's not to mention people who also have a few Ethernet connected devices taking a share.
Exactly... because while they are connected to the ROUTER at 867Mbit, unless the router is a pretty expensive one, the packets aren't being allocated simultaneously.... so the devices are often "waiting in line" while accessing the net...

So if I'm streaming 4k video on my PS4, gaming on my PC, and others are on their laptops, phones, etc... there may NOT be enough bandwidth for all... higher speeds are ALWAYS advisable - they never make it worse, and if given them, take them!
 
Exactly... because while they are connected to the ROUTER at 867Mbit, unless the router is a pretty expensive one, the packets aren't being allocated simultaneously.... so the devices are often "waiting in line" while accessing the net...
And since they are waiting because of a bottleneck from the ISP connection, they will wait the same with a faster wireless AP.
 
I don't know who really thinks that the current AC is insufficient... Perhaps mainly those who can make money by pushing the "new" standard to consumers.

My 3-year old Macbook Pro connects to my AC router at 867Mbits at all times, which shares a 250Mbit Internet connection. For home users, it is hard to fathom who or why would need more.

At those speeds I have my PC broadcast 4K videos from YouTube, while I do a lot of surfing online, all without any lag.

Yes, but add a few more devices to your router and you'll start to see it sweating. Single user is easy, even N rated routers handle it very well on 5Ghz channel.
The big plus for 11AX, at least from specs, is that it supports higher number of simultaneous clients without crashing.
 
Let's say you have 10 devices in your home. Sure, if they're all on simultaneously, then with 400Mbps available each device will "only" average 40Mbps each...but that's more than sufficient for streaming 4K video (https://www.dacast.com/blog/bandwidth-requirements-streaming-live-video/). Plus, while you might have every device accessing the network simultaneously, the chances of every device actually using 100% of its share of the connection are going to be very, very slim. Maybe with video streaming or large file transfers, but other usage isn't going to be as large.

But....

The router's WAN connection to your ISP tops out at 80 Mbps. On average, then, assuming simultaneous connections each device is going to have access to only 8 Mbps from your ISP. That's maybe enough for streaming 1080p video, but let's face it: you're not going to be streaming 4K video simultaneously on all 10 devices. Three devices, tops; maybe 4 (but you'll get that annoying "buffering..." message on them).

Or, to put it another way: let's say you have some 160MB files that are being transferred between the devices (10 simultaneous transfers). If they're just being transferred over your home network, & assuming there's no bottleneck due to the storage devices, it'll take the devices about 32 seconds to transfer the data (160 MB = 1,280 Mb; 1,280 Mb / 40 Mbps = 32 seconds). However, if all 10 devices are trying to download the file from an external site, then it's going to take them them almost 3 minutes to do so (1,280 Mb / 8 Mbps = 160 seconds), even though none of the devices are using 100% of their "available" WiFi/LAN bandwidth.

What it comes down to is that the ISP bandwidth is much more of a limitation on a device's connection than the WiFi protocol being used.
 
Yes, the majority of times the bandwidth bottleneck will be with the ISP.... but it never hurts to have better Wifi - eventually ISPs might catch up... and if you're paying for crazy speeds (there are 10gbit/s download packages), then you better have something to make that worthwhile.

Whenever a new standard comes out, there's always people saying "don't bother, the old standard is enough".... that's usually true... for the first year or so.... but the existence of the new standard generally pushes the hardware to match it.... I remember when having a 500MB HD was considered insanity. You'd never fill that!!

Well, now 500GB is looking small... same thing for bandwidth.... years from now, people will be wondering how we coped without 100gb/s connections.... or faster...
 
And yet my Wireless-G(54Mbps) wifi is still twice as fast as my WAN speeds.. And a lot more reliable for connections than Wireless-N in my house. (seriously, our G works over to the neighbors. The N pretty much only works in the room that router is located)
 
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