Tag Archives: 802.11ax

Wi-Fi 6 Release 2, Or Why Naming Conventions Suck

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I just noticed that the Wi-Fi Alliance announced a new spec for Wi-Fi 6 and Wi-Fi 6E. Long-time readers of this blog will know that I am a fan of referring to technology by the standard, not by a catch term that serves as a way to trademark something, like Pentium. Anyway, this updated new standard for wireless communications was announced on January 5th at CES and seems to be an entry in the long line of embarrassing companies that forget to think ahead when naming things.

Standards Bodies Suck

Let’s look at what’s included in the new release for Wi-Fi 6. The first and likely biggest thing to crow about is uplink multi-user MIMO. This technology is designed to enhance performance and reduce latency for things like video conferencing and uploading data. Essentially, it creates multi-user MIMO for data headed back the other direction. When the standard was first announced in 2018 who knew we would have spent two years using Zoom for everything? This adds functionality to help alleviate congestion for applications that upload lots of data.

The second new feature is power management. This one is aimed primarily at IoT devices. The combination of broadcast target wake time (TWT), extended sleep time, and multi-user spatial multiplexing power save (SMPS) are all aimed at battery powered devices. While the notes say that it’s an enterprise feature I’d argue this is aimed at the legion of new devices that need to be put into deep sleep mode and told to wake up at periodic intervals to transmit data. That’s not a laptop. That’s a sensor.

Okay, so why are we getting these features now? I’d be willing to bet that these were the sacrificial items that were holding up the release of the original spec of 802.11ax. Standards bodies often find themselves in a pickle because they need to get the specifications out the door so manufacturers can start making gear. However, if there are holdups in the process it can delay time-to-market and force manufacturers to wait or take a gamble on the supported feature set. And if there is a particular feature that is being hotly debated it’s often dropped because of the argument or because it’s too complex to implement.

These features are what has been added to the new specification, which doesn’t appear to change the 802.11ax protocol name. And, of course, these features must be added to new hardware in order to be available, both in radios and client devices. So don’t expect to have the hot new Release 2 stuff in your hands just yet.

A Marketing Term By Any Other Name Stinks

Here’s where I’m just shaking my head and giggling to myself. Wi-Fi 6 Release 2 includes improvements for all three supported bands of 802.11ax – 2.4GHz, 5GHz, and 6GHz. That means that Wi-Fi 6 Release 2 supersedes Wi-Fi 6 and Wi-Fi 6E, which were both designed to denote 802.11ax in the original supported spectrums of 2.4 and 5GHz and then to the 6GHz spectrum when it was ratified by the FCC in the US.

Let’s all step back and realize that the plan to simplify the naming convention of the Wi-Fi alliance for marketing has failed spectacularly. In an effort to avoid confusing consumers by creating a naming convention that just counts up the Wi-Fi Alliance has committed the third biggest blunder. They forgot to leave room for expansion!

If you’re old enough you probably remember Windows 3.1. It was the biggest version of Windows up to that time. It was the GUI I cut my teeth on. Later, there were new features that were added, which meant that Microsoft created Windows 3.11, a minor release. There was also a network-enabled version, Windows for Workgroups 3.11, which included still other features. Was Windows 3.11 just as good as Windows for Workgroups 3.11? Should I just wait for Windows 4.0?

Microsoft fixed this issue by naming the next version Windows 95, which created a bigger mess. Anyone that knows about Windows 95 releases know that the later ones had huge new improvements that made PCs easier to use. What was that version? No, not Windows 97 or whatever the year was. No, it was Windows 95 OEM Service Release 2 (Win95OSR2). That was a mouthful for any tech support person at the time. And it showed why creating naming conventions around years was a dumb idea.

Now we find ourselves in the mess of having a naming convention that shows major releases of the protocol. Except what happens when we have a minor release? We can’t call it by the old name because people won’t be impressed that it contains new features. Can we add a decimal to the name? No, because that will mess up the clean marketing icons that have already been created. We can’t call it Wi-Fi 7 because that’s already been reserved for the next protocol version. Let’s just stick “release 2” on the end!

Just like with 802.11ac Wave 2, the Wi-Fi Alliance is backed into a corner. They can’t change what they’ve done to make things easier without making it more complicated. They can’t call it Wi-Fi 7 because there isn’t enough difference between Wi-Fi 6 and 6E to really make it matter. So they’re just adding Release 2 and hoping for the best. Which will be even more complicated when people have to start denoting support for 6GHz, which isn’t universal, with monikers like Wi-Fi 6E Release 2 or Wi-Fi 6 Release 2 Plus 6E Support. This can of worms is going to wiggle for a long time to come.

Tom’s Take

I sincerely hope that someone that advised the Wi-Fi Alliance back in 2018 told them that trying to simplify the naming convention was going to bite them in the ass. Trying to be cool and hip comes with the cost of not being able to differentiate between minor version releases. You trade simplicity for precision. And you mess up all those neat icons you built. Because no one is going to legitimately spend hours at Best Buy comparing the feature sets of Wi-Fi 6, Wi-Fi 6E, and Wi-Fi 6 Release 2. They’re going to buy what’s on sale or what looks the coolest and be done with it. All that hard work for nothing. Maybe the Wi-Fi Alliance will have it figured out by the time Wi-Fi 7.5 Release Brown comes out in 2025.

Is the M1 MacBook Pro Wi-Fi Really Slower?

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I ordered a new M1 MacBook Pro to upgrade my existing model from 2016. I’m still waiting on it to arrive by managed to catch a sensationalist headline in the process:

“New MacBook Wi-Fi Slower than Intel Model!”

The article referenced this spec sheet from Apple referencing the various cards and capabilities of the MacBook Pro line. I looked it over and found that, according to the tables, the wireless card in the M1 MacBook Pro is capable of a maximum data rate of 1200 Mbps. The wireless card in the older model Intel MacBook Pro all the way back to 2017 is capable of 1300 Mbps. Case closed! The older one is indeed faster. Except that’s not the case anywhere but on paper.

PHYs, Damned Lies, and Statistics

You’d be forgiven for jumping right to the numbers in the table and using your first grade inequality math to figure out that 1300 is bigger than 1200. I’m sure it’s what the authors of the article did. Me? I decided to dig in a little deeper to find some answers.

It only took me about 10 seconds to find the first answer as to one of the differences in the numbers. The older MacBook Pro used a Wi-Fi card that was capable of three spacial streams (3SS). Non-wireless nerds reading this post may wonder what a spatial stream is. The short answer is that it is a separate unique stream of data along a different path. Multiple spacial streams can be leveraged through Multiple In, Multiple Out (MIMO) to increase the amount of data being sent to a wireless client.

The older MacBook Pro has support for 3SS. The new M1 MacBook Pro has a card that supports up to 2SS. Problem solved, right? Well, not exactly. You’re also talking about a client radio that supports different wireless protocols as well. The older model supported 802.11n (Wi-Fi 4) and 802.11ac (Wi-Fi 5) only. The newer model supports 802.11ax (Wi-Fi 6) as well. The quoted data rates on the Apple support page state that the maximum data rates for the cards are quoted in 11ac for the Intel MBP and 11ax for the M1 MBP.

Okay, so there are different Wi-Fi standards at play here. Can’t be too hard to figure out, right? Except that the move from Wi-Fi 5 to Wi-Fi 6 is more than just incrementing the number. There are a huge number of advances that have been included to increase efficiency of transmission and ensure that devices can get on and off the air quickly to help maximize throughput. It’s not unlike the difference between the M1 chip in the MacBook and its older Intel counterpart. They may both do processing but the way they do it is radically different.

You also have to understand something called Modulation Coding Set (MCS). MCS defines the data rates possible for a given definition of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), RSSI, and Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (QAM). Trying to define QAM could take all day, so I’ll just leave it to GT Hill to do it for me:

The MCS table for a given protocol will tell you what the maximum data rate for the client radio is. Let’s look at the older MacBook Pro first. Here’s a resource from NetBeez that has the 802.11ac MCS rates. If you look up the details from the Apple support doc for a 3SS radio using VHT 9 and an 80MHz channel bandwidth you’ll find the rate is exactly 1300 Mbps.

Here’s the MCS table for 802.11ax courtesy of Francois Verges.. WAY bigger, right? You’re likely going to want to click on the link to the Google Sheet in his post to be able to read it without a microscope. If you look at the table and find the row that equates to an 11ax client using 2SS, MCS HE 11, and 80MHz channel bandwidth you’ll see that the number is 1201. I’ll forgive Apple for rounding it down to keep the comparison consistent.

Again, this all checks out. The Wi-Fi equivalent of actuarial tables says that the older one is faster. And it is under absolutely perfect conditions. Because the quoted numbers for the Apple document are the maximums for those MCSes. When’s the last time you got the maximum amount of throughput on a wired link? Now remember that in this case you’re going to need to have perfect airtime conditions to get there. Which usually means you’ve got to be right up against the AP or within a very short distance of it. And that 80MHz channel bandwidth? As my friend Sam Clements says, that’s like drag racing a school bus.

The World Isn’t Made Out Of Paper

If you are just taking the numbers off of a table and reproducing them and claiming one is better than the other then you’re probably the kind of person that makes buying decisions for your car based on what the highest number on the speedometer says. Why take into account other factors like cargo capacity, passenger size, or even convertible capability? The numbers on this one go higher!

In fact, when you unpack the numbers here as I did, you’ll see that the apparent 100 Mbps difference between the two radios isn’t likely to come into play at all in the real world. As soon as you move more than 15 feet away from the AP or put a wall between the client device and your AP you will see a reduction in the data rate. The top end of these two protocols are running in the 5GHz spectrum, which isn’t as forgiving with walls as 2.4GHz is. Moreover, if there are other interfering sources in your environment you’re not going to get nearly the amount of throughput you’d like.

What about that difference in spatial streams? I wondered about that for the longest time. Why would you purposely put fewer spatial streams in a client device when you know that you could max it out? The answer is that even with that many spatial streams reality is a very different beast. Devin Akin wrote a post about why throughput numbers aren’t always the same as the tables. In that post he mentioned that a typical client mix in a network is 2018 is about 66% devices with 1SS, 33% devices with 2SS, and less than 1% of devices have 3SS. While those numbers have probably changed in 2021 thanks to the iPhone and iPad now having 2SS radios, I don’t think the 3SS numbers have moved much. The only devices that have 3SS are laptops and other bigger units. It’s harder for a unit to keep the data rates from a 3SS radio so most devices only include support for two of them.

The other thing to notice here is that the value of what a spatial stream brings you is different between the two protocols. In 802.11ac, the max data rate for a single spatial stream is about 433 Mbps. For 802.11ax it’s 600 Mbps. So a 2SS 11ac radio maxes out at 866 Mbps while a 3SS 11ax radio setup would get you around 1800 Mbps. It’s far more likely that you’ll be using the 2SS 11ax radio more efficiently more often than you’ll see the maximum throughput of a 3SS 11ac radio.

Tom’s Take

This whole tale is a cautionary example of why you need to do your own research, even if you aren’t a Wi-Fi pro. The headline was both technically correct and wildly inaccurate. Yes, the numbers were different. Yes, the numbers favored the older model. No one is going to see the maximum throughput under most normal conditions. Yes, having support for Wi-Fi 6 in the new MacBook Pro is a better choice overall. You’re not going to miss that 100 Mbps of throughput in your daily life. Instead you’re going to enjoy a better protocol with more responsiveness in the bands you use on a regular basis. You’re still faster than the gigabit Ethernet adapters so enjoy the future of Wi-Fi. And don’t believe the numbers on paper.

Cisco’s Catalyst for Change

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You’ve probably heard by now of the big launch of Cisco’s new 802.11ax (neé Wi-Fi 6) portfolio of devices. Cisco did a special roundtable with a group of influencers from the community called Just The Tech. Here’s a video from that event covering the APs that were released, the 9120:

Fred always does a great job of explaining the technical bits behind the APs. But one thing that caught my eye here is the name of the AP – Catalyst. Cisco has been using Aironet for their AP line since they purchased Aironet Wireless Communications back in 1999. The name was practically synonymous with wireless technologies for many people in the industry that worked exclusively with Cisco technologies.

So, is the name change something we should be concerned about?

A Rose Is a Rose Is An AP

Cisco moving toward a unified naming convention for their edge solutions makes a lot of sense. Ten years ago, wireless was still primarily 802.11g-based with 802.11n still a few months away from being proposed and ratified. Connectivity hadn’t quite yet reached the ubiquitous levels of wireless that we see today. The iPhone was only about to be on its third revision.

Cisco Catalyst devices were still the primary method of getting users connected to the network. Even laptop users hunted for Ethernet ports everywhere instead of just connecting to wireless. Ethernet was more reliable and faster than 54Mbps (at best) and fighting contention with all the other devices around. Catalyst stood for reliability.

In the time since, wireless has become the new edge device connectivity. No longer do we hunt for Ethernet ports unless we have a specific need for one. Laptops don’t come with dedicated wired networking options any longer. In 2019, wireless is king. And Aironet is the wireless name that Cisco has built. So why the change?

In short, because edge connectivity isn’t wired versus wireless any longer. Instead, it’s unified. Whether it was because of the idiotic decisions made by Gartner to required wired switching for their wireless Magic Quadrant (TM) or because people stopped thinking about Ethernet except to power wireless access points, the fact is that the edge no longer has wires. For Cisco, this means that Catalyst switches aren’t the edge any longer. So the name doesn’t have the same power as it once did.

However, the Aironet name has also lost its luster. Why? Because Aironet is a remnant of Cisco’s pre-controller AP past. The line of APs that most people are likely using in their office right now aren’t from the Aironet heritage. Instead, they are based on technology acquired by Cisco from Airespace that Cisco bought in 2005 to add controller-based technology to their portfolio. And, aside from references to Airespace in the code of the Wireless LAN Controllers (WLC), the line never really had a brand like Catalyst or Aironet.

Today, Cisco has started the move away from using Airespace technology in their controllers. As this video from 2018 shows, Cisco has begun to migrate their controller OS to a more modern platform instead of relying on modifying the old Airespace code again and again. This means that development going forward should be more rapid and less resultant on the whims of keeping everything running properly on a codebase over a decade old.

Branding New

So, that explains the reasons why Cisco might want to refresh everything. But why the naming of the APs? Why not just rely on Aironet and keep that branding going forward?

Well, because they want to make end users believe that the network is the same no matter if it’s wired or wireless. They want buyers to believe that Catalyst stands for edge connectivity, no matter where that edge might be. And, unless they really screw up and start making us think these new APs are switches they’ll be able to pull off this branding exercise fairly well.

That’s because users have stopped caring about the wired versus wireless debate. Instead, they only care about speed and reliability. 802.11ax will help on both fronts, and Cisco wants to capitalize on that by making these new APs feel different. And the best way to do that is by rebranding them.

Wireless professionals don’t care about the name. Most of the time they just refer to the model number anyway. And while Cisco’s model numbering strategies seem to be getting a bit crowded in the 9000-level of things, this makes a lot of sense to distance themselves from their past. The old 802.11ac APs are still very viable and will likely be useful all they way until the end of their life. But when the time comes to pull them out, you’ll be retiring Aironet and Airespace along with them. Even if you didn’t realize those were the branding names of those APs.

Tom’s Take

Branding matters. Or it doesn’t. Either you love the name of the thing you’ve been using or you couldn’t care less. Whether it’s an iPhone or a car or an access point, everything has a name and a number attached to it. Cisco has decided, for better or worse, to unify the edge under the Catalyst name. Maybe it will stick and reduce confusion with customers. Maybe it will be hated enough that they’ll bring back the Aironet name in a couple of cycles to “get back to basics” as it were. But for now, the catalyst for change at Cisco leads to a unified edge solution.

802.11ax Is NOT A Wireless Switch

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802.11ax is fast approaching. Though not 100% ratified by the IEEE, the spec is at the point where most manufacturers and vendors are going to support what’s current as the “final” version for now. While the spec for what marketing people like to call Wi-Fi 6 is not likely to change, that doesn’t mean that the ramp up to get people to buy it is showing any signs of starting off slow. One of the biggest problems I see right now is the decision by some major AP manufacturers to call 802.11ax a “wireless switch”.

Complex Duplex

In case you had any doubts, 802.11ax is NOT a switch.1 But the answer to why that is takes some explanation. It all starts with the network. More specifically, with Ethernet.

Ethernet is a broadcast medium. Packets are launched into the network and it is hoped that the packet finds the destination. All nodes on the network listen and, if the packet isn’t destined for them they discard it. This is the nature of the broadcast. If multiple stations try to talk at once, the packets collide and no one hears anything. That’s why Ethernet developed a collision detection  system called CSMA/CD.

Switches solved this problem by segmenting the collision domain to a single port. Now, the only communications between the stations would be in the event that the switch couldn’t find the proper port to forward a packet. In every other case, the switch finds where the packet is meant to be sent and forwards it to that location. It prevents collisions by ensuring that no two stations can transmit at any one time except to the switch in the middle. This also allows communications to be full-duplex, meaning the stations can send and receive at the same time.

Wireless is a different medium. The AP still speaks Ethernet, and there is a bridge between the Ethernet interface and the radios on the other side. But the radio interfaces work differently than Ethernet. Firstly, they are half-duplex only. That means that they have to send traffic or listen to receive traffic but they can’t do both at the same time. Wireless also uses a different version of collision detection called CSMA/CA, where the last A stands for “avoidance”. Because of the half-duplex nature of wireless, clients have a complex process to make sure the frequency is clear before transmitting. They have to check whether or not other wireless clients are talking and if the ambient RF is within the proper thresholds. After all those checks are confirmed, then the client transmits.

Because of the half-duplex wireless connection and the need for stations to have permission to send, some people have said that wireless is a lot like an Ethernet hub, which is pretty accurate. All stations and APs exist in the contention (collision) domain. Aside from the contention algorithm, there’s nothing to stop the stations from talking all at once. And for the entire life of 802.11 so far, it’s worked. 802.11ac started to introduce more features designed to let APs send frames to multiple stations at the same time. That’s what’s called Multi-user Multi-In, Multi-out (MU-MIMO).In theory, it could allow for full-duplex transmissions by allowing a client to send on one antenna and receive on another, but utilizing client radios in this way has impacts on other things.

Switching It Up

Enter 802.11ax. The Wi-Fi 6 feature that has most people excited is Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiple Access (OFDMA). Simply put, OFDMA allows the clients and APs to not use the entire transmission channel for sending data. It can be sliced up into sub-channels that can be used for low-bandwidth applications to reserve time to talk to the AP. Combined with enhanced MU-MIMO support in 802.11ax, the idea is that clients can talk directly to the AP and allocate a specific sub-channel resource unit all to themselves.

To the marketing people in the room, this sounds just like a switch. Reserved channels, single station access, right? Except it is still not a switch. The AP is still a bridge between two media types for one thing, but more importantly the transmission medium still hasn’t magically become full-duplex. Stations may get around this with some kind of trickery, but they still need to wait for the all-clear to send data. Remember that all stations and APs still hear all the transmissions. It’s still a broadcast medium at the most basic. No amount of software configuration is going to fix that. And for the networking people in the room that might be saying “so what?”, remember when Cisco tried to sell us on the idea that StackWise was capable of 40Gbps of throughput because it could send in both directions on the StackWise ring at once? Remember when you started screaming “THAT’S NOT HOW BANDWIDTH WORKS!!!” That’s what this is, basically. Smoke and mirrors and ignoring the underlying physical layer constraints.

In fact, if you read the above resources, you’re going to find a lot of caveats at the end about support for protocols coming up and not being in the first version of the spec. That’s exactly what happened with 802.11ac. The promise of “gigabit Wi-Fi” took a couple of years and the MU-MIMO enhancements everyone was trumpeting never fully materialized. Just like all technology, the really good stuff was deferred to the next release.

To make sure that both sides are heard, it is rightly pointed out by wireless professionals like Sam Clements (@Samuel_Clements) that 802.11ax is the most “switch-like” so far, with multiple dynamic collision domains. However, in the immortal words of Tyler Durden, “Sticking feathers up your butt doesn’t make you a chicken.” The switch moniker is still a marketing construct and doesn’t hold any water in reality aside from a comparison to a somewhat similar technology. The operation of wireless APs may be hub-like or switch-like, but these devices are not either of those types of devices.

CPU Bound and Determined

The other issue that I see that prevents this from becoming a switch is the CPU on the AP becoming a point of contention. In a traditional Ethernet switch, the forwarding hardware is a specialized ASIC that is optimized to forward packets super fast. It does this with some trickery, including cut through for packets and trusting the incoming CRC. When packets bounce up to the CPU to be process-switched, it bogs the entire system down terribly. That’s why most networking texts will tell you to avoid process switching at all costs.

Now apply those lessons to wireless. All this protocol enhancement is now causing the CPU to have to do extra duty to work on time-slicing and sub-channel optimization. And remember that those CPUs are operating on 18-28 watts of power right now. Maybe the newer APs will get over 30 watts with new PoE options, but that means those CPUs are still going to be eating a lot of power to process all this extra software work. Even adding dedicated processing power to the AP isn’t going to fix things in the long run. That might be one of the reasons why Cisco has been pushing enhanced PoE in the run-up to their big 802.11ax launch at the end of April.

Tom’s Take

Let me say it again for the cheap seats: 802.11ax is NOT a wireless switch! The physical layer technology that 802.11 is built on won’t be switchable any time soon. 802.11ax has given us a lot of enhancements in the protocol and there is a lot to be excited about, like OFDMA, BSS coloring, and TWT. But, like the decision to over-simplify the marketing name, the idea of calling it a wireless switch just to give people a frame of reference so they buy more of them is just silly. It’s disingenuous and sounds more like a snake oil salesman than honest technology marketing. Rather than trying to trick the users with cute sounding terms, how about we keep the discussion honest and discuss the pros and cons of the technology?

Special thanks to my friends in the wireless space for proofreading this post and correcting my errors in technology:

  1. The title was kind of a spoiler ↩︎

Wi-Fi 6 Is A Stupid Branding Idea

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You’ve probably seen recently that the Wi-Fi Alliance has decided the rebrand the forthcoming 802.11ax standard as “Wi-Fi CERTIFIED 6”, henceforth referred to as “Wi-Fi 6”. This branding decision happened late in 2018 and seems to be picking up steam in 2019 as 802.11ax comes closer to ratification later this year. With manufacturers shipping 11ax access points already and the consumer market poised to explode with the adoption of a new standard, I think it’s time to point out to the Wi-Fi Alliance that this is a dumb branding idea.

My Generation

On the surface, the branding decision looks like it makes sense. The Wi-Fi alliance wants to make sure that consumers aren’t confused about which wireless standard they are using. 802.11n, 802.11ac, and 802.11ax are all usable and valid infrastructure that could be in use at any one time, as 11n is 2.4GHz, 11ac is 5GHz, and 11ax encompasses both. According to the alliance, there will be a number displayed on the badge of the connection to denote which generation of wireless the client is using.

Except, it won’t be that simple. Users don’t care about speeds. They care about having the biggest possible number. They want that number to be a 6, not a 5 or a 4. Don’t believe me? AT&T released an update earlier this month that replaced the 4G logo with a 5G logo even when 5G service wasn’t around. Just so users could say they had “5G” and tell their friends.

Using numbers to denote generations isn’t a new thing in software either. We use version numbers all the time. But using those version numbers as branding usually leads to backlash in the community. Take Fibre Channel, for example. Brocade first announced they would refer to 16GB fibre channel as “Gen 5”, owing to the fifth generation of the protocol. Gen 6 was 32GB and so on. But, as the chart on this fibre channel page shows, they worked themselves into a corner. Gen 7 is both 64GB and 256GB depending on what you’re deploying. Even Gen 6 was both 32GB and 128GB. It’s confusing because the name could be many things depending on what you wanted it to mean. Branding doesn’t denote clear information.

Subversion of Versions

The Wi-Fi Alliance decision also doesn’t leave room for expansion or differentiation. For example, as I mentioned in a previous post on Gestalt IT, 802.11ax doesn’t make the new OWE spec mandatory. It’s up to the vendors to implement this spec as well as other things that have been made option, as upstream MU-MIMO is rumored to become as well. Does that mean that if I include both of those protocols as options that my protocol is Wi-Fi 6.1? Or could I even call it Wi-Fi 7 since it’s really good?

Windows has had this problem going all the way back to Windows 3.0. Moving to Windows 3.1 was a huge upgrade, but the point release didn’t make it seem that way. After that, Microsoft started using branding names by year instead of version numbers. But that still caused issues. Was Windows 98 that much better than 95? Were they both better than Windows NT 4? How about 2000? Must be better, right? Better than Windows 99?1

Windows even dropped the version numbers for a while with Windows XP (version 5.1) and Windows Vista (version 6.0) before coming back to versioning again with Windows 7 (version 6.1) and Windows 8 (version 6.2) before just saying to hell with it and making Windows 10 (version 10.0). Which, according to rumor, was decided on because developers may have assumed all legacy consumer Windows versions started with ‘9’.

See the trouble that versioning causes when it’s not consistent? What happens if the next minor revision to the 802.11ax specification doesn’t justify moving to Wi-Fi 7? Do you remember how confusing it was for consumers when we would start talking about the difference between 11ac Wave 1 and Wave 2? Did anyone really care? They just wanted the fastest stuff around. They didn’t care what wave or what version it was. They just bought what the sticker said and what the guy at Best Buy told them to get.

Enterprise Nightmares

Now, imagine the trouble that the Wi-Fi Alliance has potentially caused for enterprise support techs with this branding decision. What will we say when the users call in and say their wireless is messed up because they’re running Windows 10 and their Wi-Fi is on 6 still? Or if their cube neighbor has a 6 on their Wi-Fi but my Mac doesn’t?2

Think about how problematic it’s going to be when you try to figure out why someone is connecting to Wi-Fi 5 (802.11ac) instead of Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax). Think about the fights you’re going to have about why we need to upgrade when it’s just one number higher. You can argue power savings or better cell sizes or more security all day long. But the jump from 5 to 6 really isn’t that big, right? Can’t we just wait for 7 and make a really big upgrade?

Tom’s Take

I think the Wi-Fi Alliance tried to do the right thing with this branding. But they did it in the worst way possible. There’s going to be tons of identity issues with 11ax and Wi-Fi 6 and all the things that are going to be made optional in order to get the standard ratified by the end of the year. We’re going to get locked into a struggle to define what Wi-Fi 6 really entails while trying not to highlight all the things that could potentially be left out. In the end, it would have been better to just call it 11ax and let users do their homework.

  1. You’d be shocked the number of times I heard it called that on support calls ↩︎
  2. You better believe Apple isn’t going to mar the Airport icon in the system bar with any stupid numbers ↩︎

iPhone 11 Plus Wi-Fi 6 Equals Undefined?

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I read a curious story this weekend based on a supposed leak about the next iPhone, currently dubbed the iPhone 111. There’s a report that the next iPhone will have support for the forthcoming 802.11ax standard. The article refers to 802.11ax as Wi-Fi 6, which is a catch branding exercise that absolutely no one in the tech community is going to adhere to.

In case you aren’t familiar with 802.11ax, it’s essentially an upgrade of the existing wireless protocols to support better client performance and management across both 2.4GHz and 5GHz. Unlike 802.11ac, which was rebranded to be called Wi-Fi 5 or 802.11n, which curiously wasn’t rebranded as Wi-Fi 4, 802.11ax works in both bands. There’s a lot of great things on the drawing board for 11ax coming soon.

Why did I say soon? Because, as of this writing, 11ax isn’t a ratified standard. According to this FAQ from Aerohive, the standard isn’t set to be voted on for final ratification until Q3 of 2019. And if anyone wants to see the standard pushed along faster it would be Aerohive. They were one of, if not the, first company to bring a 802.11ax access point to the market. So they want to see a standard piece of equipment for sure.

Making pre-standard access points isn’t anything new to the market. Manufacturers have been trying to get ahead of the trends for a while now. I can distinctly remember being involved in IT when 802.11n was still in the pre-standard days. One of our employees brought in a Belkin Pre-N AP and client card and wanted us to get it working because, in his words, “It will cover my whole house with Wi-Fi!”

Sadly, we ended up having to ditch this device once the 802.11n standard was finalized. Why? Because Belkin had rushed it to the market and tried to capitalize on the fervor of people wanting fast connection speeds. The AP only worked with the PCMCIA client card sold by Belkin. Once you started to see ratified 802.11n devices they were incompatible with the Belkin AP and fell back to 802.11g speeds.

Belkin wasn’t the only manufacturer that was trying to get ahead of the curve. Cisco also pushed out the Aironet 1250, which had detachable lobes that could be pulled off and replaced. Why? Because they were shipping a draft 802.11n piece of hardware. They claimed that anyone purchasing the draft spec hardware could send in the lobes and get an upgrade to ratified hardware as soon as it was finalized. Except, as a rushed product the 1250 also consumed lots of power, ran hot, and generally had very low performance compared to the APs that came out after the ratification process was completed.

We’re seeing the same rush again with 802.11ax. Everyone wants to have something new when the next refresh cycle comes up. Instead of pushing people toward the stable performance of 802.11ac Wave 2 with proper design they are going out on a limb. Manufacturers are betting on the fact that their designs are going to be software-upgradable in the end. Which assumes there won’t be any major changes during the ratification process.

Cupertino Doesn’t Guess

One of the major criticism points of 802.11ax is that there is not any widespread adoption of clients out there to push us to need 802.11ax APs. The client vs. infrastructure argument is always a tough one. Do you make the client adapter and hope that someone will eventually come out with hardware to support it? Or do you choose to instead wait for the infrastructure to jump up in speed and then buy a client adapter to support it?

I’m usually one revision behind in most cases. My home hardware is running 802.11ac Wave 2 currently, but my devices were 11ac capable long before I installed any Meraki or Ubiquiti equipment. So my infrastructure was playing catchup with my clients. But not everyone runs the same gear that I do.

One of the areas where this is more apparent is not in the Wi-Fi realm but instead in the carrier space. We’re starting to hear that carriers like AT&T are deploying 5G in many cities even though there aren’t many 5G capable handsets. And, even when the first 5G handsets start hitting the market, the smart money says to avoid the first generation. Because the first generation is almost always hot, power hungry, and low performing. Sound familiar?

You want to know who doesn’t bet on non-standard technology? Apple. Time and again, Apple has chosen to take a very conservative approach to introducing new chipsets into their devices. And while their Wi-Fi chipsets often seen upgrades long before their cellular modems do, you can guarantee that they aren’t going to make a bet on non-standard technology that could potentially hamper adoption of their flagship mobile device.

A Logical Approach

Let’s look at it logically for a moment. Let’s assume that the standards bodies get off their laurels and kick into high gear to get 802.11ax ratified at the end of Q2. That’s just after Apple’s WWDC. Do you think Apple is going to wait until post-WWDC to decide what chipsets are going to be in the new iPhone? You bet your sweet bandwidth they aren’t!

The chipset decisions for the iPhone 11 are being made right now in Q1. They want to know they can get sufficient quantities of SoCs and modems by the time manufacturing has to ramp up to have them ready for stores in October. That means you can’t guess whether or not a standard is going to be approved in time for launch. Q3 2019 is during the iPhone announcement season. Apple is the most conservative manufacturer out there. They aren’t going to stake their connectivity on an unproven standard.

So, let’s just state it emphatically for the search engines: The iPhone 11 will not have 802.11ax, or Wi-Fi 6, support. And anyone trying to tell you differently is trying to sell you a load of marketing.

The Future of Connectivity

So, what about the iPhone XII or whatever we call it? That’s a more interesting discussion. And it hinges on something I heard in a recent episode of a new wireless podcast. The Contention Window was started by my friends Tauni Odia and Scott Lester. In Episode 1, they have their big 2019 predictions. Tauni predicted that 802.11ax won’t be ratified in 2019. I agree with her assessment. Despite the optimism of the working group these things tend to take longer than expected. Which means Q4 2019 or perhaps even Q1 2020.

If 802.11ax ratification slips into 2020 you’ll see Apple taking the same conservative approach to adoption. This is especially true if the majority of deployed infrastructure APs are still pre-standard. Apple would rather take an extra year to get things right and know they won’t have any bugs than to rush something to the market in the hopes of selling a few corner-case techies on something that doesn’t have much of an impact on speeds in the long run.

However, if the standards bodies prove us all wrong and push 11ax ratification through we should see it in the iPhone X+2. A mature technology with proper support should be seen as a winner. But you should see them move telegraphed far in advance with adoption of the 11ax radios in the MacBook Pro first. Once the bigger flagship computing devices get support it will trickle down. This is just an economic concern. The MacBook has more room in the case for a first-gen 11ax chip. Looser thermal tolerances and space considerations means more room to make mistakes.

In short: Don’t expect an 11ax (or Wi-Fi 6) chip before 2020. And if you’re betting the farm on the iPhone, you may be waiting a long time.

Tom’s Take

I like the predictions of professionals with knowledge over leaks with dubious marketing value. The Contention Window has lots of good information about why 802.11ax won’t be ratified any time soon. A report about a leaked report that may or may not be accurate holds a lot less value. Don’t listen to the hype. Listen to the people who know what they’re talking about, like Scott and Tauni for example. And don’t stress about having the newest, fastest wireless devices in your house. Odds are way better that you’re going to have to buy a new AP for Christmas this year than the hope of your next iPhone support 802.11ax. But the one thing we can all agree on: Wi-Fi 6 is a terrible branding decision!

  1. Or I suppose the XI if you’re into Roman numerals ↩︎