Wi-Fi Alliance launches Wi-Fi Certified 6

The Wi-Fi Alliance has announced the official launhc of its Wi-Fi Certified 6 programme, marking the earliest manufacturers can launch officially-certified products implementing the 802.11ax high-speed wireless connectivity standard.

Following the shift from IEEE-assigned standard names to a more friendly generational incrementing-numeral format announced back in October last year, the Wi-Fi Alliance's official implementation of what was previously to be 802.11ax became Wi-Fi 6. 'For nearly two decades, Wi-Fi users have had to sort through technical naming conventions to determine if their devices support the latest Wi-Fi,' said Edgar Figueroa, president and chief executive of the Wi-Fi Alliance, at the time. '[The] Wi-Fi Alliance is excited to introduce Wi-Fi 6, and present a new naming scheme to help industry and Wi-Fi users easily understand the Wi-Fi generation supported by their device or connection.'

While companies have been showing off Wi-Fi 6 hardware - including Acer, Asus, Intel, Gigabyte, MSI, Razer, and Huawei - they have been doing so without formal certification from the Wi-Fi Alliance. Now, certification is finally available - which should, in theory, see additional and hopefully more affordable Wi-Fi 6 implementations hitting the market.

'Wi-Fi Certified 6 is ushering in a new era of Wi-Fi, building on Wi-Fi's core characteristics to provide better performance in every environment for users, greater network capacity for service providers to improve coverage for their customers, and new opportunities for advanced applications,' claims Figueroa of the standard. 'Wi-Fi Certified 6 will deliver improvements in connectivity, including in high density locations and IoT environments.'

Among other improvements available from Wi-Fi 6 are tweaks to improve battery life, reduce latency, support higher numbers of concurrent users, and boost speeds compared to the previous Wi-Fi 5 standard. The Wi-Fi Alliance has confirmed that companies are passing their hardware through the certification programme now, with the Samsung Galaxy Note 10 smartphone to be the first to gain Wi-Fi Certified 6 approval.

More information on Wi-Fi Certified 6 can be found on the Official website.