Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

MediaTek recently released Tianji 9200's flagship 5G mobile chip, which supports not only 5G networks, but also the upcoming Wi-Fi 7 wireless connection. (strictly speaking, Tianji 9200 supports Wi-Fi 7 Ready.)

So what is the difference between the Wi-Fi protocols?

At present, there are several mainstream Wi-Fi protocols in the market: 802.11n, 802.11ac (wave1, wave2), 802.11ax. Such a naming is obviously difficult for a layman to understand.

However, in 2018, the WiFi Alliance officially defined the 802.11ax standard as the sixth generation of WiFi technology, which also ushered in an era of simplified naming of WiFi protocols. In other words, the name of the WiFi protocol, which was relatively unfamiliar to the layman, will become a simplified version that is easier to understand. Specifically:

802.11n becomes Wi-Fi 4

802.11ac becomes Wi-Fi 5.

802.11ax becomes Wi-Fi 6.

This naming is also easy for the layman to see that Wi-Fi 6 is newer and stronger than Wi-Fi 5.

The 802.11n (Wi-Fi 4) released by Wi-Fi 4 in 2009 is a much improved version of the Wi-Fi protocol compared to the previous generation (802.11g in 2003). Wi-Fi 4 is the first Wi-Fi technology to work in both 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands, and its transmission speed is up to 600Mbit / s.

When we configure the wireless router, we will see the setting options of 2.4G signal and 5G signal. 5G in Wi-Fi generally refers to the 5GHz band, not the 5G (fifth generation mobile communication technology) in many "5G mobile phones".

The difference between 2.4G signal and 5G signal is simply summarized as follows:

5G signal has many advantages in many aspects, such as relatively few interference sources and fast transmission rate.

5G signal "through the wall" ability is really not good, "through the wall" still depends on 2.4G signal.

2.4G terminal equipment is cheaper, so 2.4G transmission is a more economical and practical option for devices that do not require high transmission speed.

In terms of transmission speed, Wi-Fi 4 has a transmission speed of up to 600Mbit / s, which is equivalent to 600 Mbps, or, more commonly, the download speed of 600 megabytes of broadband. But in terms of practical experience, it is very difficult for Wi-Fi 4 to achieve 600m broadband speed. On the one hand, it is because of the loss of wireless transmission, on the other hand, the wireless router using Wi-Fi 4 protocol is rarely "fully equipped", so it can not reach the maximum speed.

Wi-Fi 5802.11ac (Wi-Fi 5) was released in 2013. Wider RF bandwidth (up to 160MHz) and higher-order modulation technology (256-QAM) are introduced, and the transmission speed is as high as 1.73Gbps, which further improves the throughput of Wi-Fi network. In addition, the 802.11ac wave2 standard was issued in 2015, which pushed the functions such as beamforming and MU-MIMO into the mainstream and improved the access capacity of the system. However, it should be noted that 802.11ac only supports 5GHz-band terminals, so this version of the Wi-Fi protocol does not make much sense for 2.4GHz-band devices.

To put it simply, this version of the Wi-Fi protocol further improves the Wi-Fi transmission rate and optimizes the multi-user download experience (only downlink, not uplink).

Wi-Fi 6Wi-Fi 6 (802.11 ax) achieves a 4-fold increase in network bandwidth and a 4-fold increase in the number of concurrent users compared with Wi-Fi 5. And it can run in the 2.4GHz or 5GHz band.

In terms of network speed, it does not have a great impact on ordinary home users. At present, the upper limit of household broadband in most cities is 1000 megabytes, and Wi-Fi 5 is enough to control the speed of gigabit broadband.

With regard to the number of concurrent users, it has some effect on home users, but it has little effect. It mainly lies in the use of smart home controller. With the advent of the smart home era, the number of terminals connected to the network in the home has increased sharply. In the past, there may only be a few mobile phones and computers connected to the Internet at home, but now there are more than a dozen or even twenty lighting controllers in the home. However, smart home does not have to be Wi-Fi 6, and now many smart home manufacturers have launched devices such as "master controller". The controllers of many smart homes are first connected to the "master controller", and then connected to the network by the "master controller". In this way, for the wireless router at home, it is a master controller that accesses the network directly, rather than a dozen or so independent controllers. In this way, Wi-Fi 5 can also be competent.

But for enterprise users, it is of practical significance to increase the transmission rate and the number of concurrent users. Many enterprises have actual needs for 10 Gigabit networks, or even higher-standard networks. And the number of devices connected to corporate Wi-Fi is much higher than that of home users. These requirements for Wi-Fi 5 are far from being solved.

In addition to the Wi-Fi6 protocol, there is actually a Wi-Fi6E protocol. Wi-Fi6E actually adds the 6GHz band on the basis of Wi-Fi6, so the new band has less interference and faster speed.

The development of Wi-Fi 7802.11be (Wi-Fi 7) is still in progress, but there are already some "advance versions" of devices on the market.

The goal of Wi-Fi 7 protocol is to increase the throughput of WLAN network to 30Gbps, and to provide access guarantee with low latency. In order to meet this goal, the whole protocol has been changed in both PHY layer and MAC layer.

For home users, this transmission rate may only be available for VR games or some future meta-universe applications.

Conclusion 1. For most current home users, if they are still using Wi-Fi 4 devices, they can consider upgrading to Wi-Fi 6. If you already have a Wi-Fi 5 device, you can ignore the upgrade for the time being.

2. If the actual use of terminal equipment is generally no more than 100 megabytes, then there is no problem to continue to use Wi-Fi 4.

3. At present, Wi-Fi 7 devices are generally more expensive, and many of them are actually "castrated versions", such as MIMO. So those who want to buy can wait first.

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