You have probably heard the famous quote about Wi-Fi clients: “All Wi-Fi clients are equal, but some Wi-Fi clients are more equal than others.” Ok, to be honest, there was no Wi-Fi when George Orwell published Animal Farm. But deep in your heart you know this to be true – even if they are all “just devices”, Wi-Fi clients come in all shapes and sizes. There are mobile and stationary devices, cheap and expensive brands, and also plenty of device types that require high or low data rates. Beyond this classification, another significant point of diversity in wireless devices is the Wi-Fi standard. If you are reading this post, these are probably facts known to you. But actually, our aim is to increase your visibility on the performance of recent Wi-Fi standards, which may directly impact the Wi-Fi experience. For this goal, we compare the performances of existing Wi-Fi standards. If you are perhaps not familiar with the newer Wi-Fi standards, the below figure may help you to understand the evolution of Wi-Fi with respect to the number of users and the types of applications.
Let’s remember some fundamentals first. As a rule of thumb, Wi-Fi standards are backward compatible with older ones. In addition, a Wi-Fi client can only experience the maximum performance of their device if the connected CPE matches or exceeds the standard of this Wi-Fi client. In other words, if your client supports Wi-Fi 6, but your CPE does not, unfortunately, you cannot observe the highest possible performance. Instead, you are bottlenecked by the CPE’s limitations. Before dealing with these limitations, maybe it is better to answer a fundamental question: How is the distribution of Wi-Fi devices in terms of the standards?
How many devices support Wi-Fi6?
In Europe today, 99% of Wi-Fi client stations are supported by the three most common standards on the market, which are Wi-Fi 4 (802.11n), Wi-Fi 5 (802.11ac), and Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax) (incl. Wi-Fi 6E). Depending on the country, between 19-36% of current devices support Wi-Fi 6, while the same statistic is between 35-50% for Wi-Fi 5 and 21-38% for Wi-Fi 4, as given in the figure below. Yet, we know that most of the mobile devices on the market are now deployed with Wi-Fi 6 chipsets. For example, the share of Wi-Fi 6 devices has increased by 2% in two months while the amount of Wi-Fi 4 and Wi-Fi 5 has reduced by 1% per each. So basic algebra says that the amount of Wi-Fi 6 devices may exceed 45% in some European countries by the end of 2023. This trajectory may present you with an overview of a range of Wi-Fi standards in the population for the near future. But more significantly, we need to understand the capabilities of Wi-Fi standards. Hence, we evaluate the performances of these standards with anonymized large-scale population data in the next sections.
What does Wi-Fi 6 bring?
Ok, the answer is easy to find if you ask this question to any search engine. In this case, you can find basic improvements such as; efficient usage of bandwidth, higher modulation rates, improved channel access with OFDMA and TWT, increased multiuser-MIMO (MU-MIMO) capacity, and more. As a result, maximum achievable data rates are more than doubled. Theoretically, everything looks perfect; however, in the real world, other Wi-Fi-related concepts are involved. As we have discussed, Wi-Fi 6 clients form 19-36% of the population. In other words, there are 2-3 Wi-Fi 6 clients per home on average. However, these devices are data-hungry and most IoT devices do not support this standard, hence the Wi-Fi 6 devices are not the majority of the devices in a network. Because of this reason, some of the features of this standard (e.g., OFDMA and MU-MIMO), which are designed for when the majority of the connected devices support Wi-Fi 6, cannot be effectively utilized just yet.
Advantages of having Wi-Fi 6 clients
To evaluate the Wi-Fi standards in large-scale populations, the first step is to observe clients based on supported Wi-Fi standards. With Lifemote’s advanced analytics based on collected data from all the CPEs, we are able to detect client-wise Wi-Fi problems and correlate these problems with the supported Wi-Fi standards.
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