Everything You Need to Know about Wifi 6

Wifi is about to get a whole lot – faster. New Wifi 6 technology recently developed has revolutionized the way your internet works in your home.

With any new technology, you may ask yourself, “how much better can it get?” and the answers to those questions are framed below. So let’s dive into exactly what it is that makes wifi 6 a must-have in your ever-connected household.

What is Wifi 6?

In essence, Wifi 6 routers do precisely what their predecessors did, connect your devices to the internet wirelessly. However, leaps and bounds have been made in terms of the efficiency of these devices, and wifi 6 takes this to the next level.

Wifi 6 is built for the modern internet user, who spreads their usage across multiple devices simultaneously. It evens out internet speeds across the devices allowing all to operate at peak performance while being utilized simultaneously.

This means that it’s an excellent option for places of business or households where you might be streaming in multiple rooms and working on the internet simultaneously. It will distribute your top speeds evenly over all of the different connected devices to ensure peak performance with less lag.

How Much More Speed Will Wifi 6 Give You?

Admittedly, this question is tough to answer without getting into specifics about your personal or business’ bandwidth demand.

Wifi 6 may not give you overwhelmingly faster speeds than what you currently have if you’re working on a wifi 5 platform. However, it will show an increase in speed when your wifi system is bogged down with multiple users across the platform.

As previously mentioned, this becomes beneficial in this new age where everything is connected to your wifi. When you have kids that are gaming, you’re watching streaming tv in the living room, and all of your phones and tablets are also connected, you will not experience slowdowns, buffering, or clocking in your devices.

Overall, you’ll have a much smoother and indirectly faster experience in the well-connected households that we live in today.

Battery Life Considerations

Among the many issues facing the wireless device user,  is the optimal battery life for your life on the go. Wifi 6 has been shown to extend battery life in some laptops, tablets, and other cordless devices connected to the network.

Wifi 6 improves communication between your router and your device when it’s sleeping and when it’s awake. This allows your device to spend less time searching for a signal when it might not be necessary.

This improved communication uses Target Wake Time or TWT to optimize when your antennae are powered on and should be looking for a signal. This optimizes battery life and contributes to longer run times.

Hardware and Devices

You might be asking yourself, “how will my current devices work on this new system?” In essence, the wifi 6 routers will be backward compatible so any device that operates on a wifi 4 or 5 platforms will work with the new wifi 6 standard; however, you might not see the same performance increases.

As you upgrade devices, they’ll all be built to the wifi 6 standard. So while it’s not imperative to run out and buy all new devices just for the update, as you upgrade, you’ll start to see the benefits of wifi 6.

What you WILL need to buy are new wifi 6 capable routers and antennae. This is the only way you can ensure your device with wifi 6 will seize the speed and bandwidth improvements they are capable of.

Wireless Security

At the core of every good wireless system is protection from nefarious hackers and data thieves. Wifi 6 has upgraded security technology called WPA3.

This technology protects your network by making it harder for hackers to use multiple password-guessing applications to break into your network. In addition to this, WP3 also limits the data hackers have access to if they manage to get in.

The data encryption is more robust with WP3, a mandatory attribute for all wifi 6 routers and devices. This, in totality, makes for a much more robust security system for your network.

Conclusion

Wifi 6 capability is the future of wireless internet as we know it. Higher speeds across multiple devices, better battery life, and better security offer users a much better network experience.

Whether at home or in the office, you should make upgrading your devices and hardware to take advantage of what this cutting-edge technology offers.