IT@Intel: WiFi 6–The Advantages Are Real

Description

Wi-Fi 6 may be the ideal gateway toward realization of an enterprise-wide wireless infrastructure. With many of our office spaces temporarily vacated due to the COVID pandemic, we had the unique opportunity to test this latest Wi-Fi standard in a real office environment using laptops equipped with Intel® Wi-Fi 6E (AX210) network cards. We partnered with Intel’s Client Computing Group to conduct a series of tests within these spaces. The team systematically stressed the network with scenarios relevant to today’s working environments, including an increased number of connected devices and real-time collaboration applications. We varied user counts, roaming settings, channel configurations and more to benchmark the performance of each configuration. Our test results demonstrated that a Wi-Fi 6 upgrade can provide the following advantages for a dense enterprise wireless local area network (WLAN): The ability to increase the number of users and devices per access point (AP), reducing deployment costs Enhanced support for an increasing number of devices with existing deployment densities Improved high-density performance with less interference, fewer dropped connections and more efficient packet transmission Faster data throughput Consistent service and improved reliability