Tag Archives: Wi-Fi 6E

Asking The Right Question About The Wireless Future

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It wasn’t that long ago that I wrote a piece about how Wi-Fi 6E isn’t going to move the needle very much in terms of connectivity. I stand by my convictions that the technology is just too new and doesn’t provide a great impetus to force users to upgrade or augment systems that are already deployed. Thankfully, someone at the recent Mobility Field Day 10 went and did a great job of summarizing some of my objections in a much simpler way. Thanks to Nick Swiatecki for this amazing presentation:

He captured so many of my hesitations as he discussed the future of wireless connectivity. And he managed to expand on them perfectly!

New Isn’t Automatically Better

Any time I see someone telling me that Wi-Fi 7 is right around the corner and that we need to see what it brings I can’t help but laugh. There may be devices that have support for it right now, but as Nick points out in the above video, that’s only one part of the puzzle. We still have to wait for the clients and the regulatory bodies to catch up to the infrastructure technology. Could you imagine if we did the same thing with wired networks? If we deployed amazing new cables that ran four times the speed but didn’t interface with the existing Ethernet connections at the client? We’d be laughed out of the building.

Likewise, deploying pre-standard Wi-Fi 7 devices today doesn’t gain you much unless you have a way to access them with a client adapter. Yes, they do exist. Yes, they’re final. However, they’re more final than the Draft 802.11n cards that I deployed years and years ago. That doesn’t mean that we’re going to see a lot of benefit from them however. Because the value of the first generation of a technology is rarely leaps and bounds above what came before it.

A couple of years ago I asked if the M1 MacBook wireless was really slower than the predecessor laptop. Spoiler alert, it is but not so much you’d really notice. Since then we’ve gained two more generations of that hardware and the wireless has gotten faster. Not because the specs have changed in the standard. It’s because the manufacturers have gotten better about building the devices. We’ve squeezed more performance out of them instead of just slapping a label on the box and saying it’s a version number higher or it’s got more of the MHz things so it must be better.

Nick, in the above video, points this out perfectly. People keep asking about Wi-Fi 7 and they miss out on the fact that there’s a lot of technology that needs to run very smoothly in order to give us significant gains in speed over Wi-Fi 6 and Wi-Fi 6E. And those technologies probably aren’t going to be implemented well (if at all) in the first cards and APs that come off the line. In fact, given the history of 802.11 specifications those important features are probably going to be marked as optional anyway to ensure the specifications get passed on time to allow the shipping hardware to be standardized.

In a perfect world you’re going to miss a lot of the advances in the first revision of the hardware. I remember a time when you had to be right under the AP to see the speed increases promised by the “next generation” of wireless. Adding more and more advanced technology to the AP and hoping the client adapters catch up quickly isn’t going to help sell your devices any faster either. Everything has to work together to ensure it all runs smoothly for the users. If you think for a minutes that they aren’t going to call you to tell you that the wireless is running slow then you’re very mistaken. They’re upset they didn’t get the promised speeds on the box or that something along the line is making their experience difficult. That’s the nature of the beast.

Asking the Right Questions

The other part of this discussion is how to ensure that everyone has realistic ideas about what new technology brings. For that, we recorded a great roundtable discussion about Wi-Fi 7 promises and reality:

I think the biggest takeaway from this discussion is that, despite the hype, we’re not ready for Wi-Fi 7 just yet. The key to having this talk with your stakeholders is to remind them that spending the money on the new devices isn’t going to automatically mean increased speeds or enhanced performance. In fact, you’re going to do a great job of talking them out of deploying cutting edge hardware simply by reminding them they aren’t going to see anywhere near the promises from the vendors without investing even more in client hardware or understanding that those amazing fast multi-spectrum speeds aren’t going to be possible on an iPhone.

We’re not even really touching on the reality that some of the best parts of 6GHz aren’t even available yet because of FCC restrictions. Or that we just assume that Wi-Fi 7 will include 6GHz when it doesn’t even have to. That’s especially true of IoT devices. Lower cost devices will likely have lower cost radios for components which means the best speed increases are going to be for the most expensive pieces of the puzzle. Are you ready to upgrade your brand new laptop in six months because a new version of the standard came out that’s just slightly faster?

Those are the questions you have to ask and answer from your stakeholders before you ever decide how the next part of the project is going to proceed. Because there is always going to be faster hardware or newer revisions of the specification for you to understand. And if the goalposts keep moving every time something new comes along you’re either going to be broke or extremely disappointed.

Tom’s Take

I’m glad that Nick from Cisco was able to present at Mobility Field Day. Not only did he confirm what a lot of professionals are thinking but he did it in a way that helped other viewers understand where the challenges with new wireless technologies lie. We may be a bit jaded in the wired world because Ethernet is such a bedrock standard. In the wireless world I promise that clients are always going to be getting more impressive and the amount of time between those leaps is going to shrink even more than it already has. The real question should be whether or not we need to chase that advantage.

Wi-Fi 6E Won’t Make a Difference

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It’s finally here. The vaunted day when the newest iPhone model has Wi-Fi 6E. You’d be forgiven for missing it. It wasn’t mentioned as a flagship feature in the keynote. I had to unearth it in the tech specs page linked above. The trumpets didn’t sound heralding the coming of a new paradigm shift. In fact, you’d be hard pressed to find anyone that even cares in the long run. Even the rumor mill had moved on before the iPhone 15 was even released. If this is the technological innovation we’ve all been waiting for, why does it sound like no one cares?

Newer Is Better

I might be overselling the importance of Wi-Fi 6E just a bit, but that’s because I talk to a lot of wireless engineers. More than a couple of them had said they weren’t even going to bother upgrading to the new USB-C wonder phone unless it had Wi-Fi 6E. Of course, I didn’t do a survey to find out how many of them had 6E-capable access points at home, either. I’d bet the number was 100%. I’d be willing to be the survey of people outside of that sphere looking to buy an iPhone 15 Pro that can tell me if they have a 6E-capable chipset at home is much, much lower.

The newest flagship device has cool stuff. Better cameras, faster processor, more RAM, and even titanium! The reasons to upgrade are legion depending on how old your device is. Are you really ready to sink it all because of a wireless chipset design? There are already a number of folks saying they won’t upgrade their amazing watch because Apple didn’t make it black this year. Are the minor technical achievements really deal breakers in the long run?

The fact of the matter is that the community of IT pros outside of the wireless space don’t actually care about the wireless chipset in their phone. Maybe it’s faster. Maybe it’s cooler. It could even be more about bragging rights than anything else. However, just like the M1 MacBook Wi-Fi, the real-world results are going to be a big pile of “it depends”. That’s because organizations don’t make buying decisions based on consumer tech.

Sure, the enterprise may have been pushed in certain directions in the past due to the adoption of smart phones. Go into any big box store and see how the employees are using phones instead of traditional scanners for inventory management. Go into your average bank or hospital and ask the CIO what their plans are to upgrade the wireless infrastructure to support Wi-Fi 6E now that Apple supports it across the board on their newest devices. I bet you get a very terse answer.

Gen Minus One

The buying patterns for enterprise IT don’t support bleeding edge technology. That’s because most enterprises don’t run on the bleeding edge. Their buying decisions are informed by the installation base of their users, not on their projected purchases. Enterprises aren’t going to take a risk on buying something that isn’t going to provide benefit for the investment. Trying to provide that benefit for a small number of users is even more suspect. Why spend big bucks for a new access point that a tenth of my workforce can properly use?

Buying decisions and deployment methodology follow a timeline that was decided upon months ago, even for projects that come up out of the blue. If you interview your average CIO with a good support team they can tell you how old their devices are, what order they are planned to be replaced, and roughly how much that will cost today. They have a plan ready to plug in when the executive team decides there is budget to spend. Strike while the funding iron is hot!

To upend the whole plan because some new device came out is not an easy sell to the team. Especially if it means reducing the number of devices that can be purchased because the newer ones cost more. If anything it will encourage the teams to hold on to that particular budget until the prices of those cutting edge devices falls to a point where they are more cost effective for a user base that has refreshed devices and has a need for faster connectivity.

Wi-Fi 6E suffers from a problem common to IT across the board. It’s not exciting enough to be important. The current generation of devices can utilize the connectivity it provides efficiently. The airspace in an enterprise is certainly crowded enough to need new bands for high performance devices to move into. But does the performance of Wi-Fi 6E create such a gap as to make it a “must have” in the budget? What would you be willing to sacrifice to get it? And would your average user notice the difference? If you can’t say for certain that incremental improvement will make that much of a difference for the non-wireless savvy person then you’re going to find yourself waiting for the next revision of the standard. Which, sadly, as the benefit of having a higher number. Which means it’s obviously better, right?

Tom’s Take

I like shiny new things. I didn’t upgrade my phone this year because my older one is good enough for my use case. If I were to rank all the reasons why I wanted to upgrade I’d put Wi-Fi 6E near the bottom of the list. It’s neat. I like the technology behind it. For the average CIO it doesn’t move the needle. It doesn’t have an impressive pie chart or cost savings associated with it. If you upgraded everyone to Wi-Fi 6E overnight no one would notice. And even if they did they’d be asking when Wi-Fi 7 was coming out because that one is really cool, even if they know zero about what it does. Wi-Fi 6E on a mobile device won’t matter in the long run because the technology isn’t cool enough to be noticed by people that aren’t looking for it.

Networking Is Fast Enough

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Without looking up the specs, can you tell me the PHY differences between Gigabit Ethernet and 10GbE? How about 40GbE and 800GbE? Other than the numbers being different do you know how things change? Do you honestly care? Likewise for Wi-Fi 6, 6E, and 7. Can you tell me how the spectrum changes affect you or why the QAM changes are so important? Or do you want those technologies simply because the numbers are bigger?

The more time I spend in the networking space the more I realize that we’ve come to a comfortable point with our technology. You could call it a wall but that provides negative connotations to things. Most of our end-user Ethernet connectivity is gigabit. Sure, there are the occasional 10GbE cards for desktop workstations that do lots of heavy lifting for video editing or more specialized workflows like medical imaging. The rest of the world has old fashioned 1000Mb connections based on 802.3z ratified in 1998.

Wireless is similar. You’re probably running on a Wi-Fi 5 (802.11ac) or Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax) access point right now. If you’re running on 11ac you might even be connected using Wi-Fi 4 (802.11n) if you’re running in 2.4GHz. Those technologies, while not quite as old as GigE, are still prevalent. Wi-Fi 6E isn’t really shipping in quantity right now due to FCC restrictions on outdoor use and Wi-Fi 7 is a twinkle in hardware manufacturers’ eye right now. Why aren’t we clamoring for more, faster, better, stronger all the time?

Speedometers

How fast can your car go? You might say you’ve had it up to 100 mph or above. You might take a look at your speedometer and say that it can go as high as 150 mph. But do you know for sure? Have you really driven it that fast? Or are you guessing? Would you be shocked to learn that even in Germany, where the Autobahn has an effectively unlimited speed limit, that cars are often limited to 155 mph?. Even though the speedometer may go higher the cars are limited through an agreement for safety reasons. Many US vehicles are also speed limited between 110 and 140 mph.

Why are we restricting the speeds for these vehicles? Safety is almost always the primary concern, driven by the desire for insurance companies to limit claims and reduce accidents. However, another good reason is also why the Autobahn has a higher effective speed limit: road conditions. My car may go 100 mph but there are very few roads in my part of the US that I would feel comfortable going that fast on. The Autobahn is a much better road surface for driving fast compared to some of the two-lane highways around here. Even if the limit was higher I would probably drive slower for safety reasons. The roads aren’t built for screaming speeds.

That same analogy applies to networking. Sure, you may have a 10GbE connection to your Mac Mini and you may be moving gigs of files back and forth between machines in your local network. What happens if you need to upload it to Youtube or back it up to cloud storage? Are you going to see those 10GbE speeds? Or are you going to be limited to your ISP’s data rates? The fastest engine can only go as fast the pathways will permit. In essence, that hot little car is speed limited because of the pathway the data takes to the destination.

There’s been a lot of discussion in the space about ever-increasing connectivity from 400GbE to 800GbE and soon even into the terabit range. But most of it is specialized for AI workloads or other massive elephant flows that are delivered via a fabric. I doubt an ISP is going to put in an 800GbE cross connect to increase bandwidth for consumers any time soon. They won’t do it because they don’t need to. No consumer is going to be running quite that fast.

Likewise, increasing speeds on wireless APs to more than gigabit speeds is silly unless you want to run multiple cables or install expensive 10GbE cards that will require new expensive switches. Forgetting Multigig stuff for now you’re not going to be able to plug in a 10GbE AP to an older switch and get the same performance levels. And most companies aren’t making 10GbE campus switches. They’re still making 1GbE devices. Clients aren’t topping out their transfer rates over wireless. And even if they did they aren’t going to be going faster than the cable that plugs the AP into the rest of the network.

Innovation Idling

It’s silly, right? Why can’t we make things go faster?!? We need to use these super fast connections to make everything better. Yet somehow our world works just fine today. We’ve learned to work with the system we have. Streaming movies wouldn’t work on a dial-up connection but adding 10GbE connections to the home won’t make Netflix work any faster than it does today. That’s because the system is optimized to deliver content just fast enough to keep your attention. If the caching servers or the network degrades to the point where you have to buffer your experience is poor. But so long as the client is getting streaming data ahead of you consuming it you never know the difference, right?

Our networks are optimized to deliver data to clients running on 1GbE. Without a massive change in the way that workloads are done in the coming years we’re never going to be faster than that. Our software programs might be more optimized to deliver content within that framework but I wouldn’t expect to see 10GbE become a huge demand in client devices. Frankly, we don’t need that much speed. We don’t need to run flat out all the time. Just like a car engine we’re more comfortable running at a certain safe speed that preserves our safety and the life of the equipment.

Tom’s Take

Be honest with yourself. Do you want 10GbE or Wi-Fi 7 because you actually need the performance? Or do you just want to say you have the latest and greatest? Would you pay extra for a v12 engine in a sports car that you never drive over 80 mph? Just to say you have it? Ironically enough, this is the same issue that cloud migrations face today. We buy more than we need and never use it because we don’t know what our workloads require. Instead, we buy the fastest biggest thing we can afford and complain that something is holding it back. Rather than rushing out to upgrade your Wi-Fi or Ethernet, ask yourself what you need, not what you want. I think you’ll realize the network is fast enough for the foreseeable future.

Wi-Fi 6E Growing Pains For Apple

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You may have seen that the new iPad Pro has Wi-Fi 6E support. That caused a lot of my wireless friends to jump out and order one, as I expected. As I previously mentioned, 2023 is going to be a big year for Wi-Fi 6E. I was wrong about the 6E radio on the new iPhone but given the direction that Apple is going with the iPad Pro and probably the MacBook as well we’re in for a lot of fun. Why? Because Apple is changing their stance on how to configure 6GHz networks.

An SSID By Any Other Name

If you’ve ever set up wireless networks before you know there are some different suggestions about how to configure the SSIDs with multiple bands. One school of thought says that you need to combine both 2.4GHz and 5GHz in the same SSID and let the device figure out which one is the best to use. This is the way that I have mine set up at home.

However, if you do a quick Google search you’ll find a lot of other wisdom that suggests creating two different SSIDs that only work on a single band. The thought process here is that the device can’t distinguish between the different bands once it makes a decision so it will be stuck on one or the other. While that doesn’t sound like a bad idea it does have issues in practice. What if your device chooses 2.4GHz when you didn’t want it to? What if your device is stuck on 5GHz at the limit of the noise floor in your office and you want it to swap to the other band for better throughput instead of adding another AP?

There are several reasons to have more control over how the frequency band is chosen. Sadly, Apple has never allowed the device to choose the band when joining a network. The only way to influence that selection has been to create different networks, which leads to management issues and other challenges for devices that are unable to join one network or another. The management issues made the planning process rather challenging.

Now, with the advent of a device that has a Wi-Fi 6E radio in the 6GHz range, Apple has changed their thinking about how a network should operate. In a new support post, Apple now clarifies that the SSID names should not be different for the three different bands. There’s no other mention of what happens at a device level as far as band selection.

In a different tech support article, Apple describes what happens if you don’t give them the same name. If you join a 6GHz-only network on the new iPad Pro, the device will detect there is no corresponding 5GHz network and search for one from the same AP and let you join it as well. The article for this even mentions the ominous “limited compatibility”, even if the dialog box doesn’t. If you choose to join this split SSID setup there is another confirmation box that encourages you to go tweak your SSID settings to make the name the same on both networks. I’m not sure if that same prompt comes up for 2.4GHz networks too. Maybe I can borrow someone’s iPad to test it.

Disabling New Tech

Even though Apple has never allowed users to select the band that they want to use on an SSID there is a new feature for 6GHz that gives you the opportunity to work around any issues you have with this new band. In the settings for the SSID there is a toggle for “Wi-Fi 6E Mode” that allows you to disable 6GHz on that SSID until enabled again. This way you can use the recommended settings for the SSID per Apple but still disable the pieces that might be broken.

Interestingly, this toggle only appears for 6E networks according to the support article. There’s still no way to toggle between 2.4GHz and 5GHz. However, adding this support to the network settings should be easy to carry down into the other bands. Whether or not Apple does it is a much different matter. Also, the setting isn’t currently in MacOS Ventura. That could be because there isn’t a 6E radio available in a Mac yet and the setting might not show up until there’s a supported radio. Time will tell when Apple releases a MacBook with a built-in Wi-Fi 6E radio.

Tom’s Take

After months of professionals saying that Apple needs to release support for Wi-FI 6E it’s finally here. It also brings new capabilities from the software side to control how the 6E radios are used. Is it completely baked and foolproof? Of course not. Getting the radios into the iPad was the first step. By introducing them now with software for troubleshooting and configurations and following it up with a likely 6GHz MacBook and iMac lineup soon there will be plenty of time to work out the issues by the time the iPhone 15 gets support for Wi-Fi 6E. Apple is clearly defining their expectations for how an SSID should work so you have plenty of time to work through things or change your design documents before the explosion of Wi-Fi 6E clients arrives en masse in 2023.

Monday Mobility Quick Thoughts

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I’m getting ready for Mobility Field Day 8 later this week and there’s been a lot of effort making sure we’re ready to go. That means I’ve spent lots of time thinking about event planning instead of writing. So I wanted to share some quick thoughts with you ahead of this week as well as WLPC Europe next week.

  • I remain convinced than half of the objections that are raised by oversight organizations when it comes to adopting new technology come from the fact they got caught flat-footed and weren’t ready for it to be popular. Whether it’s the Wi-Fi 6E safety issue or the report earlier this year from the FAA about 5G and airports it just seems like organizations spend less time doing actual investigation and more time writing press releases about how they are ready to figure it all out yet.
  • I also remain cautiously optimistic that the new Apple devices rumored to be coming out later this year, namely the iPad Pro and MacBook Pro with M2 chips, will have Wi-Fi 6E support. Yes, the iPhone didn’t. It’s also a smaller device with less room to add new hardware. The iPad and MacBook have historically gotten new chips before the smaller mobile device does. If I’m wrong then I guess we’ll get to see if 6E is enough of a factor to get people to ditch their Apple device for a Google or Samsung one.
  • As we rely more and more on software to expand the capabilities of our hardware I think we’re going to see more and more companies working toward the model of hardware-as-a-service. As in you lease the equipment from them for a monthly payment and, in return, you get to have a base level of features that can be expanded in higher “tiers” of service. Expect some more on this idea in the near future with the launch of solutions like Nile.

Tom’s Take

Make sure you tune in for Mobility Field Day 8 and don’t forget to tell us what you think! Maybe by next year we’ll have lots of Wi-Fi 7 content to discuss.

Why 2023 is the Year of Wi-Fi 6E

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If you’re like me, you chuckle every time someone tells you that next year is the year of whatever technology is going to be hot. Don’t believe me? Which year was the Year of VDI again? I know that writing the title of this post probably made you shake your head in amusement but I truly believe that we’ve hit the point of adoption of Wi-Fi 6E next year.

Device Support Blooms

There are rumors that the new iPhone 14 will adopt Wi-Fi 6E. There were the same rumors when the iPhone 13 was coming out and the iPhone rumor mill is always a mixed bag but I think we’re on track this time. Part of the reason for that is the advancements made in Wi-Fi 6 Release 2. The power management features for 6ER2 are something that should appeal to mobile device users, even if the name is confusing as can be.

Mobile phones don’t make a market. If they were the only driver for wireless adoption the Samsung handsets would have everyone on 6E by now. Instead, it’s the ecosystem. Apple putting a 6E radio in the iPhone wouldn’t be enough to tip the scales. It would take a concerted effort of adoption across the board, right? Well, what else does Apple have on deck that can drive the market?

The first thing is the rumored M2 iPad Pro. It’s expected to debut in October 2022 and feature upgrades aside from the CPU like wireless charging. One of the biggest features would be the inclusion of a Wi-Fi 6E radio as well to match the new iPhone. That would mean both of Apple’s mobile devices could enjoy the faster and less congested bandwidth of 6 GHz. The iPad would also be easier to build a new chip around compared to the relatively cramped space inside the iPhone. Give the professional nature of the iPad Pro one might expect an enterprise-grade feature like 6E support to help move some units.

The second thing is the looming M2 MacBook Pro. Note for this specific example I’m talking about the 14” and 16” models that would features the Pro and Max chips, not the 13” model running a base M2. Apple packed the M1 Pro and M1 Max models with new features last year, including more ports and a snazzy case redesign. What would drive people to adopt the new model so soon? How about faster connectivity? Given that people are already complaining that the M1 Pro has slow Wi-Fi Apple could really silence their armchair critics with a Wi-Fi 6E radio.

You may notice that I’m relying heavily on Apple here as my reasoning behind the projected growth of 6E in 2023. It’s not because I’m a fanboy. It’s because Apple is one of the only companies that controls their own ecosystem to the point of being able to add support for a technology across the board and drive adoption among their user base. Sure, we’ve had 6E radios from Samsung and Dell and many others for the past year or so. Did they drive the sales of 6E radios in the enterprise? Or even in home routers? I’d argue they haven’t. But Apple isn’t the only reason why.

Oldie But Goodie

The last reason that 2023 is going to be the year of Wi-Fi 6E is because of timing. Specifically I’m talking about the timing of a refresh cycle in the enterprise. The first Wi-Fi 6 APs started coming into the market in 2019. Early adopters jumped at the chance to have more bandwidth across the board. But those APs are getting old by the standards of tech. They may still pass traffic but users that are going back to the office are going to want more than standard connectivity. Especially if those users splurged for a new iPhone or iPad for Christmas or are looking for a new work laptop of the Macintosh variety.

Enterprises may not have been packed with users for the past couple of years but that doesn’t mean the tech stood still. Faster and better is always the mantra of the cutting edge company. The revisions in the new standards would make life easier for those trying to deploy new IoT sensors or deal with with congested buildings. If enterprise vendors adopt these new APs in the early part of the year it could even function as an incentive to get people back in the office instead of the slow insecure coffee shop around the corner.

One other little quirky thing comes from an report that Intel is looking to adopt Wi-Fi 7. It may just be the cynic in me talking but as soon as we start talking about a new technology on the horizon people start assuming that the “current” cutting edge tech is ready for adoption. It’s the same as people that caution you not to install a new operating system until after the first patch or service release. Considering that Wi-Fi 6 Release 2 is effectively Wi-Fi 6E Service Pack 1 I think the cynics in the audience are going to think that it’s time to adopt Wi-Fi 6E since it’s ready for action.

Tom’s Take

Technology for the sake of tech is always going to fail. You need drivers for adoption and usage. If cool tech won the day we’d be watching Betamax movies or HD-DVD instead of streaming on Netflix. Instead, the real winners are the technologies that get used. So far that hasn’t been Wi-Fi 6E for a variety of reasons. However, with the projections of releases coming soon from Apple I think we’re going to see a massive wave of adoption of Wi-Fi 6E in 2023. And if you’re reading this in late 2023 or beyond and it didn’t happen, just mentally change the title to whatever next year is and that will be the truth.

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.

When Will You Need Wi-Fi 6E at Home?

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The pandemic has really done a number on most of our office environments. For some, we went from being in a corporate enterprise with desks and coffee makers to being at home with a slightly different desk and perhaps a slightly better coffee maker. However, one thing that didn’t improve was our home network.

For the most part, the home network has been operating on a scale radically different from those of the average corporate environment. Taking away the discrepancies in Internet speed for a moment you would have a hard time arguing that most home wireless gear is as good or better than the equivalent enterprise solution. Most of us end up buying our equipment from the local big box store and are likely shopping as much on price as we are on features. As long as it supports our phones, gaming consoles, and the streaming box we picked up we’re happy. We don’t need QoS or rogue detection.

However, we now live in a world where the enterprise is our home. We live at work as much as we work where we live. Extended hours means we typically work past 5:00 pm or start earlier than 8:00 or 9:00. It means that we’re usually sending emails into the night or picking up that project to crack a hard problem when we can’t sleep. Why is that important? Well, one of the arguments for having separate enterprise and home networks for years was the usage cycle.

To your typical manager type in an organization, work is work and home is home and n’er the twain shall meet, unless they need you to work late. Need someone to jump on a Zoom call during dinner to solve an issue? Want someone to upload a video before bed? Those are reasonable requests. Mind if my home wireless network also supports the kids watching Netflix or playing Call of Duty? That’s a step too far!

The problem with enterprise networking gear is that it is focused on supporting the enterprise role. And having that gear available to serve a consumer role, even when our consumer office is also our enterprise office, make management types break out in hives.

Technology Marches In Place

Okay, so we know that no one wants to shell out money for good gear. I don’t want to pay for it out of my pocket. The company doesn’t want to pay for something that might accidentally be used to do something fun. So where does that leave the people that make enterprise wireless access points?

I’ll admit I’m a horrible reference to my friends when they ask me what kind of stuff to buy. I tend to get way too deep into things like coverage pattens and device types when I start asking what they want their network to look like. The answer they’re usually looking for is easy, cheap, and simple. I get way too involved in figuring out their needs as if they were an enterprise customer. So I know that most people don’t need band steering or MIMO support in the house. But I still ask the questions as if it were a warehouse or campus building.

Which is why I’m really starting to question how the planned rollout of technologies like Wi-Fi 6E is going to happen in the current environment. I’ll buy that Wi-Fi 6, also known as 802.11ax, is going to happen as soon as it’s supported by a mainstream consumer device or three. But elevating to the 6 GHz range is an entirely different solution looking for a problem. Right now, the costs of 6 GHz radios combined with the operating environment are going to slow adoption of Wi-Fi 6E drastically.

Home Is Where the Wi-Fi Connects

How hostile is the wireless environment in your house? Aside from the odd microwave, probably not too bad. Some of the smart utility services may be operating on a separate network for things like smart electric meters or whole-home DVR setups. Odds are much better that you’re probably in a nice clean radio island. You don’t have to worry about neighboring businesses monopolizing the air space. You don’t have to contend with an old scanner that has to operate on 802.11g speeds in an entirely separate network to prevent everything from slowing down drastically.

If your home is running just fine on a combination of 2.4 GHz for older devices or IoT setups and 5 GHz for modern devices like phones and laptops, what is the advantage of upgrading to 6 GHz? Let’s toss out the hardware argument right now. If you’re running on 802.11ac (Wi-Fi 5) Wave 2 hardware, you’re not upgrading any time soon. Your APs are new enough to not need a refresh. If you’re on something older, like Wi-Fi 5 Wave 1 or even 802.11n (Wi-Fi 4), you are going to look at upgrading soon to get some new features or better speeds now that everyone in your house is online and gobbling up bandwidth. Let’s say that you’ve even persuaded the boss to shell out some cash to help with your upgrade. Which AP will you pick?

Will you pick the current technology that has all the features you need in Wi-Fi 6? Or will you pay more for an AP with a feature set that you can’t even use yet? It’s a silly question that will probably answer itself. You pay for what you can use and you don’t try and break the boss’s bank. That means the likelihood of Wi-Fi 6E adoption is going to go down quickly if the new remote office has no need of the technology.

Does it mean that Wi-Fi 6E is dead in the water? Not really. What it does mean is that Wi-Fi 6E needs to find a compelling use case to drive adoption. This is a lesson that needs to be learned from other protocols like IPv6. If you can’t convince people to move to the new thing, they’re going to stay on the old thing as long as they can because it’s cheaper and more familiar. So you need to create a new device that is 6 GHz only. Or make 6 GHz super fast for things like media transfers. Or maybe even require it for certain content types. That’s how you’re going to drive adoption everywhere. And if you don’t you’re likely going to be relegated to the same junk pile as WiMAX and ATM LANE.

Tom’s Take

Wi-Fi 6E is the great solution for a problem that is around the corner. It has lots of available bandwidth and spectrum and is relatively free from interference. It’s also free from the need to adopt it right away. As we’re trying to drive people toward Wi-Fi 6 11ax infrastructure, we’re not going to be able to make them jump to both at once without a killer app or corner case requirement. Wi-Fi 6E is always going to be more expensive because of hardware and R&D costs. And given the chance, people will always vote with their wallet provided their basic needs are met.