WiFi 6 Router

Yes, the user experience will differ based on specific hardware being used in the router, the specifications of the hardware, and lastly, the environment it is being deployed!

Yes! The EX220-G2u router supports band steering. It automatically assigns your devices to the best available band according to the WiFi environment, balancing the network load to give each device its optimum connection.

Note that not all WiFi 6 routers support the 2.4 GHz for AX. It will be as per the hardware specification of the specified router.

The ACT supplied EX220-G2u is an AX1500 Dual Band WiFi 6 Router. It supports WiFi 6 only on the 5 GHz band. The 2.4 band will have WiFi 5 support.

The device specifications will confirm the compatibility. If it mentions that the WiFi adaptor is 802.11ax, it is WiFi 6 compliant.

TWT increases the performance of the WiFi network by a factor of 4 while improving/not impacting power requirements. It allows devices to negotiate how long and how often they will need to transmit and receive data. This allows the transponder on the device to sleep when the transmission isn’t necessary. It helps smartphones and laptops to save battery by negotiating the wakeup and sleep time of a device. In summary, TWT makes the device use the spectrum more efficiently by saving time and power.

MU-MIMO, or Multi-User, Multiple-Input, Multiple-Output technology, allows multiple users to access a wireless network at the same time without interruption or throttling. MU-MIMO also allows more downlink data to be transferred at one time, enabling access points to handle more devices at one time concurrently.

OFDMA divides a signal carrier into multiple sub-carriers to minimize distortion and degradation, it further reduces overhead and latency. Access to various users is granted in OFDMA by assigning subsets of these subcarriers to individual users. Hence it allows up to 25 to 30 clients to share a channel simultaneously, thereby improving efficiency.

WiFi 5/ 4 adopts OFDM, an older standard to encode and transmit data that can dispatch traffic only to a single recipient at a time. Due to which it can create lag while client users have to wait their turn for data.

The WiFi 6 using OFDMA can transmit data to multiple devices simultaneously, splitting traffic into smaller packets to eliminate queues.

WiFi 6 (802.11ax) will connect to 5 GHz frequencies. However, few routers can support WiFi 6 on 2.4GHz, but the standard is only ratified on 5 GHz radios for better efficiency.

The 802.11ac operates only at 5 GHz frequency.

If you have a dual-band router that supports 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz, it uses 802.11n (WiFi 4) on the 2.4 GHz frequency and 802.11ac (WiFi 5) on the 5 GHz frequency.

WiFi 6 uses orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA), MU-MIMO, beamforming, enabling higher data rates at a given range to increase network capacity.

The 1024 QAM (quadrature amplitude modulation) increases throughput bandwidth by encoding more data in the same amount of spectrum.

All WiFi 6 routers and clients are backward compatible with legacy devices and clients. This means backward support for 802.11a, b, g, n, ac modes of operation.