What is WiFi 6 And How It Will Impact The Internet?

The demand for the internet is increasing day by day and so is the new technology related to the internet. While currently, WiFi 5 is the industry standard, the next-generation of WiFi, WiFi 6 or also known as “AX WiFi” or “802.11ax WiFi” will be coming out soon and will replace WiFi 5.

WiFi 6 was developed in response to the growing number of devices in the world. Every day, the devices in every household are increasing, and almost everything requires the internet. In such cases, the previous generations of WiFi are unable to communicate with more devices at once but with WiFi 6, your router will be able to communicate with more devices at a time and also let your router send data to multiple devices in the same broadcast channel.

So, WiFi 6 will do the same basic thing as other generations of WiFi, connect your device to the internet wirelessly, however, it isn’t that simple. It comes with many more benefits and its impact will be a huge one. It not only comes with a speed boost but also with additional technologies to make all the process more efficient and faster than before.

How fast is WiFi 6?

WiFi 5, which is currently being used in most of the devices has a maximum theoretical speed of 3.5 Gbps, which isn’t what you are gonna hit in real life but compared to WiFi 5, WiFi 6 has a maximum theoretical speed of 9.6 Gbps, which is about more than 250% of the maximum speed of WiFi 5. So yeah, there will definitely be an improvement in the speeds but there is much more to WiFi 6 than just top speeds.

How will WiFi 6 impact speeds?

So, people might be expecting that they will see a drastic increase in the speed once they are connected to a WiFi 6 router, however, that might now be the case.

When there is a single device connected to a WiFi 6 connection then the speed might be only a bit faster than a WiFi 5 connection, however, the real change is seen when more and more devices are connected to the network. When multiple devices are connected to WiFi 5 or previous generation connections then they start to get overcrowded with the requests from multiple devices, which results in most of the devices having poor speeds.

However, with WiFi 6 routers, that is not the story. They are designed in such a way to keep the data distributed to all the devices effectively. All of the devices will be able to keep their top speeds even when the router is crowded with multiple devices.

Better Security

WiFi 6 also means better security. WPA3, which is the latest Wireless Encryption protocol was rolled out 2 years ago and it makes it really hard for attackers and hackers to gain control over your device and even if manages to do so, the WPA3 protocols makes some of the data almost useless even if the hacker manages to get his hands on it.

Currently, WPA3 is available but it is an option, however, for WiFi 6 devices, WPA3 is a must and that means that all the WiFi 6 will come improved, with much stronger security than before. To change your current WPA mode you will have to login to the router portal by using the ‘192.168.100.1‘ or ‘192.168.0.1‘ IP to access your router settings.

How to get WiFi 6?

Well, to get access to WiFi 6, you will need to buy new routers and devices since WiFi depends mostly on hardware, and not on software updates. So, yeah to get WiFi 6, you will need a smartphone or laptop that has WiFi 6 support and also a WiFi 6 router.

However, this isn’t that much of a big update or a game-changing one. You shouldn’t just go down to the store and buy a new device.

WiFi 6 will soon become the industry standard and new devices coming in the following years will all come with WiFi 6.