What is Wi-Fi 6

Wi-Fi 6 is the lastest Wi-Fi standard in town. The new naming convention from the Wi-Fi Alliance is to help remove the confusion the old naming convention do bring. Wifi 6 is the same as 802.11ax. Old names are now designated as follows:

802.11b is now Wi-Fi 1
802.11a is now Wi-Fi 2
802.11g is now Wi-Fi 3
802.11n is now Wi-Fi 4
802.11ac is now Wi-Fi 5
802.11ax is now Wi-Fi 6

The development of Wi-Fi 6 is targeted on improving Wi-Fi 5 (802.11ac) to be better suited to handle large devices connecting for data at the same time (including public events, hospital, schools, venue and retail stores), with a speed capability of up to about 9.6 Gbps (theoretical speed). It is 3 times faster than that of Wi-Fi 5 (802.11ac).

As the demand for  higher-resolution video streaming, demanding gaming performance, and more connected devices increases, Wi-Fi 6 will be there to deliver them all to us.

Security Improvement in Wi-Fi 6

With all the above highlighted wonderful features of Wi-Fi 6, it won’t be nice if nothing has come up on security.

Wi-Fi Alliance has began to certify products that support WPA3, and expected that with the release of the Wi-Fi 6, there should be a great pace in the adoption of WPA3.

WPA3 protection won’t just come — it is going to take a long time for it to be fully implemented across board. First, going from the hardware such as your routers and connecting devices have to be made to support this standard either through getting new ones or upgrade from vendor.

For the sake of compatibility, devices that support WPA3 can still connect with devices that use WPA2, your old devices won’t stop working because you got new ones.

WPA 3 offer protection against offline, password-guessing attacks. This is where an attacker captures data from your Wi-Fi stream, brings it back to a private computer, and guesses passwords over and over again until they find a match.

It also come with a privacy feature called forward secrecy that prevent attackers from reading older data using latest attacks as explained by the Alliance.

Many companies such as Cisco,  Qualcomm, and others has already started working on hardware and chips  that supports 802.11ax and WPA3.