Gadgetory

every once in a while it feels like the stars just align perfectly for me we were literally right in the middle of planning a Wi-Fi upgrade so that we could test the brand new Wi-Fi six capabilities of the Samsung Galaxy S 10 series when our buds over at Cisco reached out to sponsor a video explaining the benefits of Wi-Fi 6 so we were like ah so yeah you know that beastly new access point well I think to really show off the benefit of Wi-Fi 6 we'd probably need a couple of those not ok yeah so done so today's video then is all about what Wi-Fi 6 is why you might care and when you can expect widespread adoption and we're also gonna take it for a test drive with the shiny new Galaxy S 10 plus so strap in cuz this is gonna be fun while our ApS are being installed let's talk about what is the same physically the hardware for Wi-Fi 6 is actually quite similar so on the client side cell phone and other device manufacturers can continue to lean on the antenna design experience that they've gained from previous generations of Wi-Fi with even the battery consumption of new Wi-Fi 6 chipsets only expected to increase during times of continuous high speed data transfer and even then that's only because the data rate is higher so nothing really changes there as for the deployment that's basically the same remember your best practices for AP positioning run your Ethernet and wire everything up to your network switch because Wi-Fi 6 is backwards compatible any legacy clients on the network won't even know the difference now let's talk about what is different which is basically everything starting with even the name Wi-Fi is undergoing a much needed and surprisingly sensible rebranding right now from 802.11 something something for those curious by the way this generation was going to be called 802.11 a x2 simple numbered generations so AC becomes 5 and becomes 4 and so on and so forth with these little icons that are designed to inform consumers which generation is supported by both their client and the AP that they happen to be connected to next up is the deployment yeah ok it's not quite the same so Wi-Fi 6 handles more clients and more cluttered environments better so you might not actually need as many APs which is nice but watch out because you're not gonna be saving a buck here each of those access points could be handling multiple gigabits of data per second across literally hundreds of clients so your commodity gigabit p OE sweet sweet your commodity gigabit POS which isn't gonna cut it anymore so we're moving to this maroc ems 355 24 X 2 it's 24 multi gigabit ports could actually be fully loaded with mr 55 access points thanks to its beefy 740 watt power supply and this thing is rated at up to 640 gigabit per second of switching capacity and all of that is important because even though it's rated at a mere 39 percent faster throughput so about 600 megabit per second versus 433 on a single 80 megahertz 5 gigahertz channel thanks to packing more data into each payload Wi-Fi 6 has some truly game-changing features when it comes to multi client access that are going to result in far higher overall data rates and less waiting so first of all access points can be configured with up to an 8 by 8 antenna configuration so that is 8 for sending and 8 for receiving and on top of that Wi-Fi 6 supports up to 8 concurrent downlink streams with multi-user MIMO that is a huge increase or the for concurrent downlink streams that was supported with Wi-Fi 5 so this widening of the highway so to speak is a big part of what's gonna make Gen 6 so critical to making Wi-Fi usable in large venues like sports arenas and crowded concert halls but it's not even close to the entire picture the next huge innovation for large-scale deployments was actually borrowed from cellular networks with Wi-Fi 6 the band or the frequency range that would have made up a traditional channel can be split using a technique called orthogonal frequency-division multiple access or OFDM a so you know how one of the best pro tips for anyone living in an apartment is to use a scanner to see what channel your neighbors are on and then manually switch over to a different one well forget about it ofd ma allows each band be it 20 40 or all the way up to 160 megahertz to be split up into multiple chunks as many as 78 sub channels and each one of those can be allocated to a separate client now obvious to make all of this work the access point needs to get a little bit smarter fortunately it did with Wi-Fi 6 an AP can negotiate what are called deterministic connections allowing it to exercise a great deal of control over the connected clients and how they're allowed to behave so first a client gets dynamically assigned however many channels or sub channels can be spared at that moment then things get even crazier each client gets a schedule for when it's allowed to transmit and receive data now hold on a second I know that in the computing world scheduling a data transmission usually means increased latency which is one of the biggest issues with Wi-Fi today but in practice what this means is less collision mitigation overhead which means that there's actually less waiting around think of it kind of like a perfectly executed zipper merge on the highway so it will actually reduce latency that means yes friends gaming on Wi-Fi without lag spikes could actually be a thing with Wi-Fi 6 go figure another fun feature of deterministic connections is that they can be used to save power so you know you're connected smart light switch your Anna's on button your asset tags etc etc etc right now they waste a ton of power constantly checking in with the network hey you got anything for me no ok how about now got anything for me no ok well with scheduled check-ins called target wake-up time your devices can check-in far less frequently dramatically increasing their battery life the coolest thing about Wi-Fi 6 though is not the techie specs as much as I personally get really amped on that stuff rather it's the different experiences that it enables like have you ever tried to stealthily have a video chat at the back of a lecture hall or upload a video to YouTube from a large event it's a total mess and I mean even something as stupid as breaking for lunch during a conference can absolutely crush your mobile experience as everyone jumps on Facebook at exactly the same time well thanks to everything I've talked about already and actually a whole host of other new features including better beamforming spatial frequency reuse and dynamic fragmentation which makes better use of the available spectrum oh man actually I forgot to mention that to down the line we're even getting more spectrum in the five to six gigahertz range that's gonna be sweet anyway the point is with all of this new tech this is not like an incremental generational evolutionary improvement and you could even argue that this is the biggest fundamental change that we've seen yet for Wi-Fi and I for one and stoked but it's always a but isn't there the one buzzkill today is that while Wi-Fi 6 is backwards compatible you're gonna have to wait a little while longer for the kick ass experience that I've talked about here because the promises of Wi-Fi 6 can only be fully realized once client devices with support for these new features start to overtake their legacy counterparts now the good news is that at least they're already showing up so all that's left in this video then is to take our S 10 plus for a quick test drive now one problem I have is that we don't have a couple hundred of these so I'm not going to be able to do like a mega and client test or anything like that but we can at least make sure that everything's working properly here in the office with a quick speed test so without further ado let's see just how fast we can make this go so the first thing that I noticed just connecting to our new access points is that remember those little icons I told you guys about it's right there at the top of the phone Wi-Fi 6 so you'll know that you're negotiating your link using the correct generation of the technology so that's pretty cool then for us remember we just upgraded to 10 gigabit internet so as long as we can find a speed test server that can take the burn then all we got to do is run a simple speed test here and have a look at what kind of speeds that we can get and I have never seen anything like this that upload speed 800 megabit per second guys not only is this Wi-Fi this is Wi-Fi on a mobile device this is a 2 by 2 antenna configuration that is real-world speeds of like 800 we're getting close to if I actually plug the USB type-c dongle into my phone and plugged it into the wall that's absolutely incredible and like I said before it is absolutely just the tip of the iceberg so thanks for watching guys thanks to Cisco for sponsoring this video if you guys disliked it you can hit that button but if you liked it hit like get 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