With industry momentum mounting around Wi-Fi 6, Wi-Fi Alliance introduced Wi-Fi CERTIFIED 6 to ensure devices based on IEEE 802.11ax technology meet industry agreed standards for interoperability and security.

The Wi-Fi Alliance certification program, coming in the third quarter of 2019, will provide capacity, coverage, and performance required by users to experience next generation Wi-Fi use cases, from streaming ultra high-definition (Ultra HD) movies to business applications.

Wi-Fi CERTIFIED 6 brings benefits including higher data rates, increased network capacity, improved performance in congested environments, and improved power efficiency. These capabilities include:

• Uplink and downlink orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA): increases network efficiency and lowers latency for high demand environments
• Multi-user multiple input multiple output (MU-MIMO): allows more data to be transferred at once and enables an access point to transmit to a larger number of concurrent clients at once
  
• Transmit beamforming: enables higher data rates at a given range resulting in greater network capacity
  
• 1024 quadrature amplitude modulation mode (1024-QAM): increases throughput in Wi-Fi devices by encoding more data in the same amount of spectrum
• Target wake time (TWT): significantly improves battery life in Wi-Fi devices, such as Internet of Things (IoT) devices

New generational terminology will help consumers easily identify devices with the latest Wi-Fi technology and better understand if devices will deliver the expected Wi-Fi experience.

Wi-Fi 6 products are featured at CES2019.