- I'm in a mall right now and I'm trying to update
my Instagram story. Now, I've connected to the public Wi-Fi. You've probably guessed it's not working and you probably already know why: 'Cause I'm connected to public Wi-Fi. Let's see, no, still nothing. What should I do? Well, it's what most people do. We disconnect our Wi-Fi
and we connect to 4G and it works 10 times better. Why is it that 4G, cellular technology, is so much better in public
places and in a lot of places, even at work or school, than
you good old, standard Wi-Fi? It feels like cellular
technology has gone so far where Wi-Fi is kind of
still in the Stones Ages. Well, I got good news for you. That's about to change. Wi-Fi 6, 802.11AX. Let's talk about that. (laid-back dubstep music) Wi-Fi 6 is the answer to most
of our wireless problems. It's really amazing. I think it's one of the
most important updates we've had to Wi-Fi in a very long time. And you might be wondering,
"What's this Wi-Fi 6 business? "I thought Wi-Fi standards
came in 802.11N or 802.11AC.". No, no, we do still have that. The real name of Wi-Fi 6 is
801.11AX, that's the new name. But the Wi-Fi Alliance is giving them a nice, friendly name now, Wi-Fi 6, so we can, you know, make
it easier for most people. And that means that AC was 5 and N was 4 and so on and so on. It makes it easy. Just so long as they don't,
you know, do the next standard as like, Wi-Fi 6S or jump
right to Wi-Fi 10. (laughs) That would be dumb, so let's
not do that Wi-Fi Alliance. So, how will Wi-Fi 6 solve our high-density, congested areas? When we're in schools, malls, airports? How will it solve those problems? Well, before I jump into that, and it's a whole slew of
amazing things it does, before I jump into it, let's
analyze how Wi-Fi works now and why we have a problem, 'cause it's crazy, guys, seriously. So, let's check it out real quick. Okay, buckle your seat belts. I'm about to show you how
wireless works right now. Your current Wi-Fi in your enterprise and everywhere you use
Wi-Fi, this is how it works. And again, it's crazy, so here we go. Let's say we get a small network, like one access point, one AP. You might have this in your house, you know, in a small office. Now, let's put three
devices on this network. Now, most networks have a lot more, so I'm keeping it very simple. So, let's say we have a cell
phone, maybe a smart lightbulb. That's actually a smart
lightbulb right now. Alexa, change office lights to blue. - [Alexa] Okay.
- Smart. - [Alexa] Thanks.
- Okay. (laughs) And then maybe a laptop or a computer. Okay, these are all connected to our wireless access point here, and that's how they get their internet. Pretty typical scenario. And right now, all these
devices are waiting on some sort of data from the access point. So, the phone guy, he just
refreshed his Twitter feed, so he's waiting on some
Tweets to hit his feed. The lightbulb is waiting
on his color to be changed, so he might be waiting on a,
just hey, change my color. And the laptop might be
watching YouTube videos, so he might be waiting on
some video streaming packets. And I'll just draw an arrow, I guess. That's his video stream. Now, you might think that,
oh, well, the access point will just send the data to
all of them all at once. That makes sense, right? But that's not how it works. (laughs) And it's, watch this, oh my gosh. The access point can only
talk to one device at a time, so it's more like this. Hey, phone, here's your
Twitter feed refresh. Okay, we're done here? Okay, cool. Alright, lightbulb,
here's your color change. We're done here? Okay. Computer, here's your YouTube video. Alright, we done here? Okay, we're good. Again, this is one at a time. This is how it currently works, from 802.11AC and before,
everything before. This is how our wireless works. Now, it gets even worse. So, not only is he only able to talk to one device at a time, he's having to wait his turn. You see, while he's trying
to talk to these devices, these devices are also
trying to talk to him and it's kind of like a
four-way stop, you know? You come to a stop sign,
but you've also got three other cars that are coming. You have to wait for the all clear. You can't all go at once or your collide and that's exactly what's happening in the airwaves right here. It's just a big, messy,
oh, oh gosh, oh gosh. So, the AP is waiting for an all clear and then he's clear to send his traffic. Now, I know what you might be thinking. You might be thinking, well, Chuck, my wireless works fantastic in my house. I'm watching this video
right now on YouTube. It looks great, it looks crisp. I don't have any problems. And hey, I agree with you. My wireless actually works
great right now, too. But the reason it works great right now even though this inefficiency is here is because we've made it fast. With each generation of
Wi-Fi we've introduced, we've made it go faster, we've made it just a little bit better. So, with the earlier standards, it might have been like,
okay, here's your data. Okay, here's your data. Okay, here's your data. But with later standards, it might be bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam. We made it faster but we still
have that same inefficiency where the access point can only talk to one device at a time. Now, here's what just makes me angry, to think this is how it works. (laughs) Our access point will communicate with all our devices on the network over what's called a channel, or you can think of it as like a highway, and the bigger our channel, the more bandwidth can go across, and theoretically, the
faster our network can be. Same like a highway, the
bigger your highway is, the more cars that can go across. Okay, we understand that concept. So, when we upgrade
our wireless standards, going from N to AC, we've been
making our channels bigger, allowing more bandwidth to go across, but we still have that
same original inefficiency. So, for this example, let's say this channel was 20 megahertz wide and it's a gorgeous channel,
it's a gorgeous road. Let me just polish it up a bit here. And really, it's more
than enough bandwidth to handle all the traffic for
all three of my devices here. But how does it work? Well, when my phone needs
to update its Twitter feed and my lightbulb needs
to get some information and my laptop needs to watch a video, well, the AP still has to
give the entire channel, the whole highway, to
one device at a time. So, Twitter feed. Even though the Twitter feed only requires just a little bit of bandwidth, he still gets the entire
channel, the entire highway. Same thing for the lightbulb. That's a very, very, very
small amount of traffic. Like, just a little bitty
tiny bit of bandwidth, but he gets the entire channel every single time he needs something. Boom, boom. And while he's given that channel, no one else can use it, which
again, is kind of inefficient. I want you to focus on that, inefficient. Now, again, you probably
think your Wi-Fi's fine on a small network, 'cause it is. Companies like Cisco
design their access points to be super, wicked fast
with the AC standards, so this highway is going boom,
boom, boom, boom, boom, boom super fast, but it's
still really inefficient. So, what does Wi-Fi 6 do with this? Why is this new version so spectacular? Well, let's get into it. So, the AC and previous standards had something called OFDM, or, now here we go, this is a big one, orthogonal frequency-division
multiplexing, which basically took our highway, our big channel, 20 megahertz, 40, 60, and we added lanes to our highway. Boop, boop, boop, boo. So, we kind of put our
channel into what's called, or cut up our channel into
what's called subchannels. And the purpose behind that is just like any other highway you think. We put a lane in there so
we can avoid interference with the cars going across the channel. Stay in your own lane, that's basically what this is for. That's OFDM. Okay, cool, we divided up
our channel into subchannels. Awesome, but you still have to give all of those subchannels, all those lanes, to each device one at a time. We still have that same inefficiency. Ah! (laughs) So, even though my phone
refreshing its Twitter feed only needs like, half a lane of traffic, he gets the whole highway just
for him, just for himself. (laughs) That's smart. Not really, no, it's stupid. Now, again, I want to hit this point home. You're not gonna have a lot of issues with just three devices on your network, 'cause boom, boom, boom, it's really fast. But when you're on a public
Wi-Fi or you're at a conference, and you're sharing that one
access point, that one channel, with maybe 20, 30, 40 devices? Well then, that's a lot of devices talking to one device at a time, which is why you feel the pain. You start to feel the
hurt, the congestion, all the contention, it's ridiculous. It's like 40 people all trying
to talk to one guy at a time and he's trying to talk to all them. It ain't gonna work. It's just gonna be a bunch of noise. That crowd drone you normally hear, just the white noise of
people talking, it's horrible. It's this inefficiency
that Wi-Fi 6 is solving and that's why it's so huge. Because we're not just increasing speed. We're not just making it
talk to one device faster. We're changing the whole game. What if I told you that up until now, the way we've been using Wi-Fi has been more like a network hub, if you're familiar with
networking concepts. But with this new Wi-Fi 6 and this new feature
I'm about to talk about, it's like we've gone
from a hub to a switch. It's huge, it's crazy. So, with Wi-Fi 6, we take that OFDM, the orthogonal
frequency-division multiplexing, and we add one more letter
to it to make it amazing. We add an A, so now it's orthogonal frequency-division
multiple access. Let me add that A there. Now, what's so special about this? Well, the headline, I'll go
ahead and ruin it for you, (laughs) is that the AP can now talk to multiple, several devices at once whereas before, it could only
talk to one device at once. Okay, big improvement. But it takes it even further
and this just makes me drool. I love it, check it out. With OFDM, we divided our
channel into subchannels, lanes on a highway. With OFDMA, we're still doing that, but we can divide it even further. So, we can make the lanes smaller. Now, what's the point of doing that? Why make the lanes smaller? Why have little more bite sized chunks? Because we can do this, watch this. Let's get back to my example where my phone needs some Twitter stuff and my lightbulb needs a color and my laptop needs to stream a video. Well, the access point can
communicate with our devices, figure out how much bandwidth they need, how much of that channel
they actually need, and reserve pieces. These are also referred to
as resource units or RU's. So, for a Twitter feed, we might just need a little bit of space right here and that's how much we're reserving in that channel for the Twitter feed. And then maybe the lightbulb only needs just a little chunk right here, too. Just a little. And the laptop, he's streaming video, so he might be streaming a huge 4K video, so we'll give him some more stuff. We'll give him maybe,
three whole subchannels. And that was actually two. I mean, I can count, don't worry. (laughs) So, once the AP has figured out how much of the channel
to give each device based on their bandwidth needs, he can then send it all at once
in one transmit opportunity. Now, that is stinkin' efficient. Compared to how it was before, where he's talking to one device at a time and he's giving them the entire highway, the entire 20 megahertz channel or however big the channel is? Now, he can divide up a channel based on their bandwidth
needs and send it all at once. That is huge. But wait, there's more. (laughs) Of course there's more. Now, up until now,
you're about to find out, the AP has had no control
over the uplink traffic. He can't control when
someone sends him data, so he's always fighting for the air time. There's always a bunch of contention going on in the airwaves. But now with OFDMA, he can control when devices can send data to him and how much bandwidth
they're allowed to send, how much of the channel
they're allowed to use. He now has kind of ultimate control over the downlink and uplink. Insane. So, no longer is the access
point in a big battle with all the devices on his network. No, he's in control now. He can say, everyone be quiet. Okay, phone, you can send data. I'm sending stuff to you. We have this much of
the channel allocated. Allocated? Allocated. And it's beautiful. Versus what we had before,
this is groundbreaking. Can you imagine what it's gonna do for the services and devices that require like, a really great quality of experience or quality of service, like,
let's say, for example, my phone was about to
place a VoIP call, right? And it's over Wi-Fi? Well, the AP can work with my phone, give him that little
sliver of the channel, just enough for a VoIP
call, which isn't big. And he's reserved this
red carpet treatment on the downlink and the uplink. I've heard a lot of
people compare this to, like a virtual circuit
or a virtual tunnel. Your own little special HOV lane or whatever you want to call it on the highway, on the channel. Guaranteeing your traffic. We've never had this much control over the traffic on the wireless network. Now, the reason all this stuff, ODFMA, which is, by the way, is just
one new feature of Wi-Fi 6. Why all this is awesome is because it's addressing our needs of the future. So, a big part of what we're
doing now with wireless is we're putting a lot of
IoT devices in our networks. Little small devices that
don't need a lot of bandwidth, but they're still
connected to our wireless. And we're deploying a ton of them. Like, you might have a factory with thousands of little devices that communicate with your access point, giving it metrics, little metric updates like hey, I need to be
fixed or hey, I'm okay. And with the old way of doing
wireless, think about this. Let me draw it out. We just have a ton of little
IoT devices on the network and even though each of these don't need much bandwidth at all,
they don't need anything, just a little bit of room on the highway. Even though they only need a little bit, the old way is gonna give each one of these little guys the entire highway. That's so inefficient and you can see why that would be a huge problem. Like, that network would be bad. (laughs) But with OFDMA, we can give each of these little guys
a sliver of the highway. We can fill this highway with little tricycles or whatever (laughs) and then we can send the data all at once to all of these guys. So, it's huge for IoT. It's huge for conferences,
where you have a ton of people connecting to one AP, like Cisco Live. Anybody going to Cisco Live? I'm hoping that in the next few years, we'll see some AX, some Wi-Fi 6, that will help us out with the congestion. Airports, schools, hospitals. You've got these medical devices that are like, really intense. Like, they have to be up,
they have to be running because they're communicating
some very sensitive data. Heart rate monitors and such. You know, life or death situations. They've gotta have
great Wi-Fi connections. But again, like, hospitals, they have a lot of people connecting. From patients to all the instruments. We need a different solution, we needed a more efficient solution, solutions that can deal with
these high-density situations and that's what Wi-Fi 6 does with OFDMA. That's why this solution is so killer. That's why I'm excited about this. If it were just faster,
I wouldn't be so excited. We've been getting faster and faster Wi-Fi with every new standard
and yeah, AX is faster. I think 802.11AC was around
866 megabits per second of maximum throughput when
you're talking, like, one device. Like, one AP to one
phone using one antennae. And with AX, it goes up to like, I think, 1200 megabits per second. So, it is faster. But that's just an afterthought
when you look at OFDMA. It's so much better. Insanely better. Now, we could probably stop at OFDMA and be happy with the new Wi-Fi 6. Like, that's more than enough. But it has a ton of new features. Now, I'm only gonna go
through two more of them that I think are just super noteworthy. So, real quick, here it is. So, looking back at IoT, I
mean, Wi-Fi 6 is all about supporting IoT and a bunch of devices. A big feature it's implementing is something called TWT,
or Target Wake-up Time, and it's centered around this: Let's say this is a smart candle. It's not, but let's say I
put a Wi-Fi radio in this and I have it set to, like, it'll alert me when it's out of wax or it might just tell me
what the wax level is. And I don't need to hear
that information constantly. Like, not like, 20 times a day. Maybe once a day at the end of the day. And that's how a lot of IoT devices work. They communicate one
time with one bit of data once in a blue moon, okay? Cool. Why is that a big deal? Well, because their Wi-Fi radios have to be up, running,
and active all the time. They have to be up and
ready to send that data so it can stay associated
with that access point, with this guy right here. Now, that's inefficient because you're having your Wi-Fi
radio up and running, probably full blast, and
you're wasting battery life. What Target Wake-up Time
does is the AP and the device can work together and
figure out a schedule on when he needs to be woken up. So, again, my candle only needs to communicate with me once a day, so he might say, "AP, I'm
gonna sleep for 23 hours a day. "I'm gonna turn off my radio "but can you wake me up every day at 7 PM "so I can send you some
data about my wax levels?". And they say okay. So, he's able to power down his radio and save some battery life. Now, the battery life for one IoT device probably isn't a lot,
nothing to write home about. But when you're taking
factories and hospitals and schools full of these IoT
devices with Wi-Fi radios? If you could power those down, that could add up to a huge power savings and it's not just IoT, actually. It's for our phones as well. Manufacturers of phones can now use this technology,
this Target Wake-up Time, to save battery life on your cell phones. That's huge because even
though this is a newer phone, the iPhone 10, my battery
life is starting to wane and I sure would like it to last longer. So now, they can boast about
even longer battery life without even improving on
their battery technology. They can just talk with the AP and make the device go to sleep. And even more with IoT. I know, we've been
talking a lot about IoT. Well, it's the future. Even more, guess what's back? Guess what's making the comeback that went away in the last
standard but it's here now? The 2.4 gigahertz spectrum. It's back! He's back again, alright. Why is that cool? Well, AC, the last
standard we just released, it's been a while, it only supported five gigahertz channels, which is great. It gives us a lot of bandwidth
and a lot of improvements. However, 2.4 disappeared. No 2.4. If you wanted to support 2.4
gigahertz in your environment, you had to rely on 802.11N. But now, with AX, 2.4 is back and why that's important
is for, again, IoT. A lot of IoT manufacturers, when they set up these IoT
devices, when they build them, they want to keep it pretty cheap. And that involves, maybe, putting in a lower end Wi-Fi radio that
only supports 2.4 gigahertz. Well, AX will fully support
that and that's awesome. It also gives you longer range. 2.4 is longer range
Wi-Fi so your IoT devices can be dispersed father away. This is actually the first advancement to the 2.4 gigahertz
spectrum since 802.11N. So, it's been a good while, like 10 years. So, this is cool. (laughs) Wait, hold on. Do you guys hear that? There's like, some guy talking. I live in an apartment and there's people, sometimes, that are in
the next apartment over and I can kind of hear
their muffled sounds. I don't know what they're saying and they're not talking to me. But how annoying would it be if every time I heard that while
we're recording this video, I just stopped and listened? And then when they were done,
I started talking again. That would be a horrible video. Who would do that? You would just tell me to ignore them. That's how Wi-Fi kind of
works right now. (laughs) Did you know that? Our access points will do that. They will, if they hear
any kind of other channel, other wireless SSID's, you know,
networks out there talking, even if they're far away,
if they can just hear the muffled noise,
they'll stop and listen, thinking it might be for them. This is called CCI or
common channel interference and it's dumb because it interferes with our wireless performance. But with Wi-Fi 6, it introduces a thing called BSS Coloring, which basically means you assign your Wi-Fi network a color. You color your network. So, we'll say my network
right now is team blue and my neighbor over here
next to me is team red. Well, when team red is over there talking, my network will ignore it
because it's not team blue. You only listen to team blue. We only hear about team blue. That feature will help out with that common channel interference and it's huge because wireless
communication is all about avoiding that contention,
of avoiding overlaps so that you have that clear communication. Now, it's funny, I kind of listed off those last few features like they were just afterthoughts
because OFDMA is that cool, what is does for us,
how it changes the game. Exciting, new, it's cool. AX is gonna be a game changer for us. But when is it actually
gonna start being adopted? When is it gonna hit the market? Well, the standard is almost
finalized by the IEEE, which doesn't mean much. I mean, people, there are AP's out there already that support AX. And at Mobile World Congress, we had a few devices announced
that will now support AX. The new Samsung phones, I think LG, they will have AX support. So, we're seeing some devices
comes to market with it. But with that being said, when should you start buying 802.11AX or
Wi-Fi 6 access points? Should you buy them as
soon as they come out? As soon as they hit the market this year? You know, I would say yes,
even if you don't have a lot of AX endpoints on your network. Why would I say that? Because that's the only benefit, right? Well, no, actually not. Not only is AX the most backwards compatible standard out there, so it'll support all your
devices no matter what, but even if you have a small number of devices that support
AX on your network, it will instantly improve
your wireless just like that. Because with technologies like OFDMA, it will instantly make your AX devices much more efficient on your network. Which means that all your other devices, your AC's and your N's, aren't competing or contending with the
AX's for channel usage. Your air is a bit more clean and clear. So, it's kind of like the more AX devices you add to your environment,
the cleaner your air is. They're like little air
purifiers for your Wi-Fi. Wireless purifiers. I'm gonna trademark that. Now, what if you want
to upgrade right now? What if you're rocking some 802.11N AP's and you need to upgrade your network? Should you wait for Wi-Fi 6 or AX AP's? Which actually should
come out pretty soon. It might be a moot point by
the time you watch this video. But should you wait or should
you upgrade now to AC AP's? I think if you're rocking
some old equipment, you should upgrade now. (laughs) Because you want your network
fast and reliable right now and going from N to AC,
it did do a lot of things, a lot of improvements. But that won't be the answer for everyone, 'cause your environment
might be pretty unique. If you have a lot of IoT devices, if you have huge bandwidth
requirements that rely on Wi-Fi, it might be a different thing for you. You might want to wait
for some AX which, again, is coming out really, really soon. Now, what about 5G? 5G is getting pretty popular. It's a big technical buzzword. How is this gonna effect AX? Well, you know, they're
both pretty similar. They both offer higher performance. Ooh, coffee. (game chatters) They both offer higher performance. They both offer, you
know, larger capacity. In theory, one day, we
should be able to just be connected to 5G and hand off and connect to our Wi-Fi seamlessly. It's gonna be awesome. Now, another big application
for Wi-Fi 6 is VR. It's gonna be huge 'cause
more and more things are becoming reliant on VR. Everything from collaboration
to video game. (laughs) We're seeing more of that and it requires more bandwidth, more capacity, and that's why Wi-Fi 6 is helping us move into the future with this cool stuff. I mean, it's awesome. I mean, check this out. I'm at the office right now. I'm teleworking. Whoa, my hand's in my face. Making coffee. Maybe one day, none of
us will be in the office. We'll all just be commuting like this and we'll need some killer Wi-Fi. If you want to know more about Wi-Fi 6 and see what AP Cisco is coming out with, check out the links below. You know Cicso's gonna have some killer access points coming out that support AX. Well, guys, that's about it. I got some work to do. (laughs) I'll catch you guys later. I'm gonna brew some more coffee, actually. (laid-back dubstep music)
