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Chips, Glorious Wi-Fi 6E Chips!

Qualcomm, owners of the Atheros line of Wi-Fi radios, recently announced the availability of Wi-Fi 6E chips. Game onnnnnnn! 6 GHz Wi-Fi is here. Sort of... Qualcomm is selling Wi-Fi 6E (802.11ax w/ 6 GHz support) chips, but we don't yet know when enterprise-grade APs and mobile devices will begin supporting 6 GHz Wi-Fi. Chip-to-product timelines can vary. Wi-Fi 5 (802.11ac) saw enterprise WLAN vendors sell products only a few months after chip announcements. Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax) saw the big vendors wait a year or more before introducing new AP models. A ton of concerns factor into a vendor's decision on when to develop, manufacture and market new AP technology. Vendors with small market share may be extra eager. Aerohive tried to boost their enterprise Wi-Fi profile by being a leader in Wi-Fi 6. On the other hand, some vendors' enthusiasm for new Wi-Fi hardware may be dulled by competing organizational initiatives. Aruba/HPE, for example, was veering f...
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At Least They Didn't Blame the Wi-Fi

Prime Video's stream of the 49ers-Cardinals NFL game received plenty of bad reviews on social media. While most of the negativity focused on stream quality, Wi-Fi largely escaped blame. There is one application type that confounds networks above all others, and it is live video. Pick your poison: voice, location tracking, on-demand video, cloud-hosted apps... None of them cause problems as consistently or predictably as the livestream. The issue is a simple one: broadcast vs. two-way. Packetized data networks are a two-way communication medium. Receiver must acknowledge sender. Live video has, since its inception decades ago, been a broadcast technology. Your television doesn't send anything to the local broadcast tower. Same with cable boxes. Same with satellite dishes. Pushing against this immutable scientific fact is commerce. Sports leagues see the billions of dollars being spent by streaming services, and they want some. Streaming services see the millions of eyeballs tun...
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Five Facts About 6 GHz Wi-Fi

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Two pieces of important news hit the wire recently: the 6 GHz band was approved for Wi-Fi, and alcohol sales have skyrocketed .  Combine the two, and what do we get? A five-pack of Coors Light Cold Hard Facts about Wi-Fi in the 6 GHz frequency band. Editor's note: This is a relatively long post, but 6 GHz Wi-Fi is an undoubtably robust topic. If you have questions after reading this blog, comment below or contact Ben via email or Twitter using the information below, and Sniff Wi-Fi will address those answers in a future post. We may be knee-deep in a global pandemic, but that doesn't mean your humble blogger can't brew up a post on the topic of 6 GHz Wi-Fi. Wi-Fi professionals will soon have unlicensed frequency available in the 6 GHz band. Here, then, are five facts to know about Wi-Fi in the soon-to-be-available 6 GHz frequency band. Fact #1: The 6 GHz band adds 1,200 MHz of spectrum for Wi-Fi The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is the federal ...
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