The Wi-Fi Alliance has just announced Wi-Fi 6 CERTIFIED Release 2 with new features that support increasing device and traffic density, and improve power management with Wi-Fi devices and applications.
There are two main changes to the standard:
- Support for uplink multi-user multiple input, multiple output (multi-user MIMO) which will help with video conferencing, faster uploads, more reliable gaming, and IoT use cases.
- Power management features that will mostly provide benefit smart home, smart city, and Industrial IoT (IIoT) environments
- Broadcast target wake time (TWT)
- Extended sleep time
- Dynamic multi-user spatial multiplexing power save (SMPS)
That means there are now three Wi-Fi 6 standards with the original WiFi 6, WiFi 6E, and the new WiFi 6 Release 2. The good news is that the new Release appears to be backward compatible with both WiFI 6 and WiFi 6E and several companies provided quotes for the press release saying how grateful they were to have their hardware selected as WiFi 6 Release 2 test bed devices. Those includes:
- Broadcom Wi-Fi 6E access point and client device reference designs
- Infineon AIROC Wi-Fi family of products
- Intel Wi-Fi 6E AX210
- Maxlinear WAV600-2 product family
- MediaTek Filogic family
- Unspecified chips from Qualcomm, Broadcom, NXP, and others
So I assume existing WiFi 6 and WiFi 6E routers and devices can just be updated to WiFi 6 Release 2 with a simple firmware upgrade provided the vendor provides it.
Via Liliputing
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
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