FEATURE: WI-FI DEPLOYMENT
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Following the white paper
released by the World
Broadband Alliance (WBA)
that provides deployment
guidelines for a number
of possible scenarios
utilising Wi-Fi 6 technology,
Jacques Visser, Head of
Wireless at Vox, says South
African companies should
familiarise themselves with
it, and the ways in which
they can use it to enhance
their business operations.
A
s the quality and speed
of Internet connectivity
continues to improve, thanks
to technologies such as
fibre, LTE and the upcoming 5G, users
are responding by connecting even more
devices to their local area networks. They
are engaging in bandwidth intensive tasks
such as making latency-sensitive video
calls, streaming content in 4K, and adding
Internet of Things devices that continually
transmit small packets of data.
on usage under typical conditions in order
to improve the performance of the entire
network, which is fundamentally different
from the existing standard where the focus is
on peak data rates under perfect conditions.
The partners have further made naming
conventions for these technologies easier to
understand. Instead of making customers
wonder what terms such as 802.11a/b/g/n
or 802.11ac mean and trying to figure out
which is the better product, the industry
body is switching to the use of numbers,
with this newest iteration – 802.11ax –
being branded Wi-Fi 6. This nomenclature
will be retrospectively applied to previous
technologies, with 802.11ac being Wi-Fi 5,
and 802.11n being Wi-Fi 4.
Key features of Wi-Fi 6 include improved
performance, particularly in high-density,
high throughput environments; better
resource utilisation and lower latency
enabling service level assurances; serving
multiple users simultaneously to boost
capacity; flexible channel sizes and target
wake time for more efficient IoT support;
colour codes to reduce collision between
signals from nearby networks; and providing
up to six times the speed of 802.11ac.
Quality Wi-Fi in high-
density environments
Wi-Fi networks face two major challenges,
namely to be able to counter the incredibly
complex security risk, and to provide more
efficient ways to handle the growing
and diverse amount of traffic as well as
bandwidth needs. Wi-Fi 6 will address the issues experienced
by the continued and expanding success
of Wi-Fi in the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands
and will be key to delivering the increased
capacity and performance required for next
generation connectivity.
To solve this, the Wi-Fi Alliance has identified
improvements to the current standard,
802.11ac. A key improvement was to focus One of the focus points was to enhance
the efficiency of how access points handle
devices simultaneously. It’s not about
Next-gen Wi-Fi
for smarter
buildings and cities
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