Wi-Fi 6 isn't signed off yet, but boffins are already teasing us with specs for venerable wireless tech's next gen

As the IEEE 802.11 project, forebearer of Wi-Fi, marks its 30th anniversary next month, Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax) gear is just beginning to appear in the market, even as the spec awaits final ratification later this year. But wireless networking boffins are already salivating at the prospect of Wi-Fi 7 (802.11be), the specification …

[b0llchit]

Wifi generations

I'm sincerely conflicted here. On one side we have Zaminski's law^(*) and good, fast, cheap; pick two.... When we reach wifi version 7, will it a) be able to read my email or b) be very good and fast so that it is too expensive? Maybe I'm just missing the AI angle^(**), which makes the standard evolve in a natural way to adapt to the environment it is used in. Then it surely will be able to read email and be horribly priced.

Transmitting analog signals has been very stable (radio/TV) for a long time. In the digital age, we are "fixing" the transmission/encodings every few years. What a waste of resources we are creating. Maybe we should take a break and let practicalities prevail over shiny-shiny-new-new hypes every few years?

(*) Yes, yes, its about software, but wifi is 95% software on top of not too complex hardware (relatively speaking).

(**) AI probably planned for wifi version 8 or 9, maybe, when the market droids can see a profit?

[anthonyhegedus]

Re: Wifi generations

You have a point. Wouldn't it be good to invent a software-upgradeable spec. Something whereby wifi-7 devices will always be able to upgrade - at least for the next few iterations - with software alone. It might make for bulkier, more expensive hardware, but at least it's hardware that won't need to be thrown away when a new spec comes along with faster speeds. There is of course the fact that the hardware doesn't need to be thrown away at all: if you've got a wifi-7 device, it'll still *work* with wifi-8 and 9, just slower.

Analogue TV has been around for a while as you say, but it had many different specs (PAL, SECAM, NTSC) and different variants of each. It made hardware totally incompatible unless it was designed specifically for compatibility. But yes, once we settled on a spec, it did last a while, at least within one country.

[john.w]

Re: Wifi generations

Having worked on the 802.11a to 11ad chipsets the problem is the chip has a selling price based on its silicon area and the software to run it is provide free.

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Re: Wifi generations

> we are "fixing" the transmission/encodings every few years. What a waste of resources we are creating

We are innovating to put more and more data in the same finite frequency spectrum by being cleverer.

Of course most of that extra data is cat videos and ads but that's not the scientist's fault

[Tom 7]

Re: Wifi generations

This time last year we upgraded from 1.2Mb bb to >30Mb 4G which seems to manage near 100Mb during the day occasionally. We have a couple of holiday cottages on it and everything is normally fine but every now and then one of the cottages complains its slow, if my youngest hasn't already done so. I noticed it happens when one cottage comes back from the beach and several gigabytes of pictures are sent to Apple and then back to the other families members iDevices in the cottage. Other clownsharing (sic) methods are available.

Alas the photos/videos increase in size far faster than the Wifi Committee can keep up with.

[NeilPost]

Re: Wifi generations

There is no correlation between WiFi and Broadband. You are just describing increased usage ... if people elect to not syncing over their mobile data plan. No difference that if perhaps they came up from the beach and spin Netflix or iPlayer up.

[Nick Ryan]

Ah yes, super duper really clever WiFi with a growing number of ariels. All quite incompatible except in fallback mode with the huge number of mobile phones, tablets and laptops and the odd other device type that are out there.

None of this really gets past the fact that there is limited bandwidth, this is shared between all devices within range (which is a very variable concept) and as a result often sucks balls in any form of vaguely high densitity environment such as where one has more than one or two neighbours. Wires may not be so glamorous, nor so convenient (which is the major advantage of WiFi) but are considerably more efficient, faster and reliable.

[Charles 9]

"Wires may not be so glamorous, nor so convenient..."

Nor so easy to change out when their specs improve (like switching your cables from Cat5 or even Cat3 to Cat6). Plus it requires access to the infrastructure: not guaranteed.

I once read on research into "massive" MIMO setups that are claimed to have no theoretical limit on bandwidth efficiency, though I'm of course taking this with a pinch of salt, given at some point you hit physical limits like radio wavelengths and so on.

[Anonymous Coward]

claimed to have no theoretical limit on bandwidth efficiency

Claude, is that you? Stop spinning, you'll set the coffin on fire.

[Nick Ryan]

Yep, that is very true when it comes to replacing cables. Luckily this doesn't tend to need to happen very often (for most people) and where it does need to be happen one hope that structured cabling management was in place rather than plastered in cables - which I've come across far too often.

WiFi is a broadcast technology compared to cables which are not a broadcast technology; As a result running one cable of an arbitrary standard next to another simply provides double the bandwidth with no concerns about them interferring with each other (OK, not always true, but should be) but WiFi does not have this capacity. WiFi is good for convenience, cables are best for everything else.

[NeilPost]

I can’t see much benefit from upgrading Cat 5 to Cat 6... unless they have some gold plated connections and are £30 a pop from Curry’s.... LOL.

A new gigabit switch replacing a 100mbit one may give a bigger boon moving data around within your property/devices.

[bombastic bob]

limited bandwidth - yeah, seen that

it is true that you (generally) won't find any "green field" situations any more. When I scan wifi at my house I typically see 10 or more SSIDs (including mine). I suppose apartment buildings are worse. And then at a customer's office [where I'm doing hardware/software development that includes wifi capability] a typical scan might have 20 or more entries, many of which are duplicates of the same SSID on different channels and frequency bands. So yeah, wifi is pretty "full" at the moment, and you can't deny that your neighbor might just want to use his 320Mhz bandwidth and, in doing so, partially stomp on yours...

Good news is that FCC is apparently opening up more frequencies for wifi in the 6Ghz range. Hopefully U.K. and E.U. regulators will do similar things.

Now.. what about that whole "last mile wireless" idea...

[NeilPost]

Yes same situation as ‘my fibre broadband’ is shit.... though they have a laptop with shitty 11g WiFi in it.

[AMBxx]

Something missing

No mention of any new conspiracy theories? Brain control, Covid spreading, cancer causing?

[Korev]

Re: Something missing

It were Bill Gates wot dun it wiv vaccine robots...

[Anonymous Coward]

Wi-Fi 7 had us on 'Extremely High Throughput'...

It also can burn tumours away if you stand too close to your your router. And cause third degree burns too.

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Re: Wi-Fi 7 had us on 'Extremely High Throughput'...

If you get the beam shaping correct you can simply then excise the tumour as soon as it's formed

[TrumpSlurp the Troll]

Is that a hedgehog in your pocket?

Or just the latest MiMo device?

[Tom 7]

Re: Is that a hedgehog in your pocket?

Perhaps Covid-19 is indeed a small wifi router after all,

[BrownishMonstr]

Re: Is that a hedgehog in your pocket?

Ermm, no.

Covid-19 came from a Chinese person who time-travelled from the future, where people are immune to different diseases than us.

True story.

[FXi]

Intel Shenanigans

So with the Wifi standard being upended every 2-3 years, why would Intel (who recently purchased the Killer lineup and makes the #1 preferred wifi client cards) be so gung ho about soldering wifi chips in mobile devices? Planned decrepitude anyone?

[Efer Brick]

WFii 6 + 5g =

Conspiracy theories e11 ?

[P.B. Lecavalier]

Meanwhile...

Meanwhile my internet access speed is well below the limits of wireless-N, so no salivation on my part.

Also, questionable name in "802.11be".

Is it n, ac or ax?

It's "be"!

Wow, you are on wireless-b??? Good on you to be so patient.

No, it's "bee EEE!"

Ok you got to have a certain age to have known 802.11b... which was even before I had any such device.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Meanwhile...

Agreed on the draft 802.11 naming conventions. I swear the IEEE is trolling us when they assign new WiFi standard names.

[logicalextreme]

Re: Meanwhile...

Yeah, I first heard of "WiFi 6" a few weeks ago and wondered what it meant and also what had happened to WiFi 1–5 as I'd never heard of them either. A quick look at the naming convention answered that for me quickly enough (the last one I remember appearing, and not-so-coincidentally the latest one my router supports, is n, and even the single letters were questionable enough).

[Richard Boyce]

Aerials

How many ISPs are going to supply routers with 8 aerials?

[Phil O'Sophical]

Re: Aerials

How many ISPs are going to supply routers with 8 aerials?

All of them.

How many of those aerials will all be connected to the same piece of wire? Well, that's up to marketing.

[Anonymous Coward]

I had my mother in-law who noticed I had split the Wi-Fi in the house - and have the SSID 2G and SSID 5G for the 2GHz band and 5GHz band.

For some reason, she thought it was the same as the 5G mobile signal tech... *sigh*

Her, and those conspiracy people who think 5G causes health issues are going to have a problem with 6G and 7G Wi-Fi hotspots start appearing everywhere...

[Flywheel]

But will it work with "real" walls ???

As someone living in a Victorian stone-built property with walls not made of breeze-blocks/plasterboard, I'd be very keen to try out any WiFi system that could penetrate these!

[Tom 7]

Re: But will it work with "real" walls ???

I can assure you that simply build cob walls, when slightly damp, can stop the EMP from several thermonuclear devices in the upper atmosphere. Victorian Stone is a piece of piss in comparison. I can go into my roof space and see next door (20yds) and the farm across the valley. In the house not a peep!

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: But will it work with "real" walls ???

Yup. Old house - plasterboard, very simple internal wall structures - brill wifi wherever.

Moved to 1930's house where every wall seems to be drill-busting solid brick (in most places) and wifi is really, really bad. So much so, I've got powerline wifi extenders now.

[Nick Ryan]

Re: But will it work with "real" walls ???

Try living in an area where traditional walls were made out of flint. Crystalline and often having a nice high iron content, tends to shatter when hit and will quickly blunt all but the best diamond tipped drill bits. I tended to get through 3 diamond tipped bits for every 2 holes.

Later, in the same area, when things started to be built using bricks these often contained lots of smaller bits of flint meaning that it was pot lock whether or not one would be able to drill into a particular brick or not. Often what happened, other than the obligatory smoke coming out of the hole, that the flint rock inside the brick shook and vibrated so much it created its own cavity inside the brick.

[LB45]

How about just fixing all the little bug?

Enough with the featuritis, how about fixing some of the bugs, security holes, tightening up the code and just getting things working as they were designed (promised) to do?

Some stability instead of pushing the marketing/sales wish list would be nice.

And not just for WiFi. For almost all soft/hardware these days.

[Charles 9]

Re: How about just fixing all the little bug?

Where's the money in it? It's not like Joe Stupid's gonna tell the difference. Remember, we're talking people who see their Facebook have a hiccup and scream to their nearest tech-head friend/relative, "My Internet is Broken!"

[Kevin McMurtrie]

Re: How about just fixing all the little bug?

Thumbs up. I want to upgrade to a "certified correct and reliable" WiFi device. Apple devices are consistently bad. Android phones are reliable or not based on nobody-knows-what.

Yes, I know WiFi is hard. The frequencies overlap with Bluetooth, microwave ovens, radar, half the chips inside a computer, 10 neighbors' WiFi, and your own signals arriving late because they took the scenic route. Once 500Mbps is hit I'd upgrade for robustness before speed.

[DS999]

Pointless

There's no use case for faster wifi connections. Sure, business/corporate users with dozens or hundreds of people connecting to a single AP could benefit from this, but faster speeds do nothing for home users.

Better latency would be nice though, and especially less jitter. Too bad they have to all that other crap when we'd all benefit more immediately from a Wifi 6.1 that added that stuff onto 802.11ax.