Time to read: 3 minutes 58 seconds | Updated: October 16, 2025
Wi-Fi 6 What is Wi-FI 6 (802.11ax)?
Wi-Fi 6 is the name given to the IEEE 802.11ax standard by the Wi-Fi Alliance, an industry organization that provides thought leadership, spectrum advocacy, and industry collaboration. The new numbering makes it easier to distinguish between the different Wi-Fi generations. Wi-Fi 6 is designed to improve efficiency with up to 4x faster speeds and more capacity than Wi-Fi 5 (802.11ac). It also offers stronger guest and password security.
Wi-Fi 6 explained
Wi-Fi 6, also known as 802.11ax, expands on the 802.11ac standard. Wi-Fi 6 provides increased speed, flexibility, and scalability to support growth in the number of IoT and client devices, increased use of cloud, and digital transformation initiatives. It enables IT to keep pace with increased demand for Wi-Fi leveraging the same 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands as Wi-Fi 5.
The key innovation with Wi-Fi 6 is the Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA) feature and is focused on increasing the number of devices supported in tomorrow’s networks.
Why Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax)?
The demand for wireless access is dramatically increasing, and the number and variety of devices and applications continues to grow. Wi-Fi 6 helps accommodate the growing number of mobile and IoT devices by increasing network efficiency and speed to better meet IT and business requirements.
What problem does Wi-Fi 6 solve?
Wi-Fi 6 was designed to get better efficiency out of the existing 2.4GHz and 5GHz spectrums to support increasing bandwidth requirements of applications and a soaring number of mobile and IoT devices.
What are the key features of Wi-fi 6?
- Orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) effectively shares channels to increase network efficiency.
- Multi-user multiple input, multiple output (multi-user MIMO) allows more downlink data to be transferred at one time, enabling access points (APs) to concurrently handle more devices.
- Target Wake Time (TWT) significantly improves network efficiency and device battery life, including IoT devices.
- IoT handling operating mode for low-power, low-bandwidth devices like sensors, automation, and medical devices.
- WPA3 and Enhanced Open strengthen user privacy in open networks, simplify configuring security for headless IoT devices, and add higher levels of security to meet government, defense, and industrial requirements.
What are the benefits of Wi-Fi 6?
- Higher data rates with 1024 QAM
- Increased capacity
- Improved performance in environments with many connected devices
- Improved power efficiency
- Enhanced support for IoT devices
How does Wi-Fi 6 work?
Wi-Fi 6, which is based on the IEEE 802.11ax standard, goes beyond boosting network speed and combines innovative technologies to improve overall network performance when connecting large number of devices running high-bandwidth, low-latency applications.
Wi-Fi 6 networks boost capacity by leveraging these new 802.11ax features:
- OFDMA improves the utilization of RF section by increasing granularity and scheduling flexibility to transmit and receive data from large numbers of wireless clients
- 8x8 uplink/downlink MU-MIMO and BSS Color provides up to four times more capacity to handle more devices
- Target wake time (TWT) improves network efficiency and device battery life, including that of IoT devices
- 1024 quadrature amplitude modulation mode (1024-QAM) increases throughput for emerging, bandwidth-intensive uses by transmitting more data in the same amount of spectrum.
Wi-Fi 5 vs Wi-Fi 6
| Wi-Fi 5 (802.11n/ac) | Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax) | |
|---|---|---|
| Channels available | 20/40/80/160 MHz | 20/40/80/160 MHz |
| Bands used | 2.4 and 5 GHz | 2.4 and 5 GHz |
| Maximum # Spatial Streams (SS) to increase peak data rates | 4×4 | 8×8 |
| Highest order of modulation to increase bits/symbol and decrease error margin | 256-QAM | 1024-QAM |
| Multi-user MIMO to increase efficiency by providing concurrent user uploads | downlink only | uplink and downlink |
| OFDMA to increase efficiency by combining short packets | No | Yes |
| IoT Target Wake Time to conserve battery life | No | Yes |
| BSS Coloring to increase capacity and channel reuse | No | Yes |
| Enhanced Open to provide encryption on open, non-password protected networks | No | Yes |
| WPA3 for more robust authentication | No | Yes |
How do I choose a Wi-Fi 6 vendor?
To choose a Wi-Fi 6 vendor, consider networking and Wi-Fi vendors that:
- Demonstrate industry leadership as recognized by leading analysts such as Gartner, Forrester, and IDC.
- Deliver built-in security with unified policy enforcement across wired and wireless networks.
- Simplify operations by using AI and machine learning to automate optimization and provide actionable recommendations to remediate issues.
- Offer secure, energy efficient IoT capabilities to enable you to leverage APs as an IoT connectivity platform using Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), Zigbee, or USB ports.
- Provide the flexibility to manage on-prem or in the cloud and to deploy with or without gateways.
HPE offers Wi-Fi 6 access points solutions by both HPE Aruba Networking and HPE Juniper Networking.
FAQs
What’s driving the need for Wi-Fi 6 adoption?
The growing demand to connect more devices to the network increases network traffic. Additional devices require more bandwidth, and organizations everywhere want faster speeds to support business applications. With device proliferation on a global scale, the need to improve the efficiency of the existing 5GHz and 2.4GHz spectrum becomes critical.
What are the advantages of Wi-Fi 6 deployments?
By leveraging the latest features of 802.11ax, Wi-Fi 6 will enable you to boost the performance and client density on your network to support new bandwidth-hungry applications and enable the digital transformation of your business.
What are the key capabilities of Wi-Fi 6 technology?
The key features unique to Wi-Fi 6 include: OFDMA scheduling, 1024-QAM data encoding, MU-MIMO transmission capability, BSS Coloring for boosting channel reuse, Target Wake Time (TWT) to reduce power utilization by client devices, support for 4–8 spatial streams of data, dynamic transmission fragmentation, and finer carrier spacing (78.125 kHz vs 312.5 kHz).
What is the difference between Wi-Fi 6 and Wi-Fi 6E?
If you are looking to further boost performance by taking advantage of the 6 GHz spectrum and channels by a growing number of global government bodies, learn more about Wi-Fi 6E, which builds on the features and technologies of Wi-Fi 6 while adding access to the 6 GHz band.