WiFi 4 vs WiFi 5 vs WiFi 6. N vs AC vs AX. Wireless Speed Test & Router Benchmark. 2020
249WiFi 4 vs WiFi 5 vs WiFi 6. N vs AC vs AX. Speed Test & Router Benchmark.
The computers used in this test had TP-Link and Asus internal wifi 6 cards.
(N or WiFi 4) TP-Link N450 TL-WR940N (AC or WiFi 5) Asus AC1900 RT-AC68U TP-Link AC2600 Archer A10 vs (AX or Wifi 6) D-Link AX5400 DIR-X5460, TP-Link AX1800 AX20, AX1500 AX10
802.11n or WiFi 4 2007
802.11n is an amendment that improves upon the previous 802.11 standards, that had the first draft of certification published in 2006. The 802.11n standard was retroactively labelled as Wi-Fi 4 by the Wi-Fi Alliance.[36][37] The standard added support for multiple-input multiple-output antennas (MIMO). 802.11n operates on both the 2.4 GHz and the 5 GHz bands. Support for 5 GHz bands is optional. Its net data rate ranges from 54 Mbit/s to 600 Mbit/s. The IEEE has approved the amendment, and it was published in October 2009.[38][39] Prior to the final ratification, enterprises were already migrating to 802.11n networks based on the Wi-Fi Alliance's certification of products conforming to a 2007 draft of the 802.11n proposal.
802.11ac or WiFi 5 - 2013
IEEE 802.11ac-2013 is an amendment to IEEE 802.11, published in December 2013, that builds on 802.11n.[42] The 802.11ac standard was retroactively labelled as Wi-Fi 5 by Wi-Fi Alliance.[36][37] Changes compared to 802.11n include wider channels (80 or 160 MHz versus 40 MHz) in the 5 GHz band, more spatial streams (up to eight versus four), higher-order modulation (up to 256-QAM vs. 64-QAM), and the addition of Multi-user MIMO (MU-MIMO). The Wi-Fi Alliance separated the introduction of ac wireless products into two phases ("waves"), named "Wave 1" and "Wave 2".[43][44] From mid-2013, the alliance started certifying Wave 1 802.11ac products shipped by manufacturers, based on the IEEE 802.11ac Draft 3.0 (the IEEE standard was not finalized until later that year).[45] In 2016 Wi-Fi Alliance introduced the Wave 2 certification, to provide higher bandwidth and capacity than Wave 1 products. Wave 2 products include additional features like MU-MIMO, 160 MHz channel width support, support for more 5 GHz channels, and four spatial streams (with four antennas; compared to three in Wave 1 and 802.11n, and eight in IEEE's 802.11ax specification).[46][47]
802.11ax or WiFi 6 2020
IEEE 802.11ax (marketed as Wi-Fi 6 by the Wi-Fi Alliance) is the successor to 802.11ac, and will increase the efficiency of WLAN networks. This project has the goal of providing 4x the throughput of 802.11ac at the user layer,[62] having just 37% higher nominal data rates at the PHY layer.[63] The 802.11ax standard is expected to become an official IEEE specification in September 2020.[64] In the previous amendment of 802.11 (namely 802.11ac), Multi-User MIMO has been introduced, which is a spatial multiplexing technique. MU-MIMO allows the Access Point to form beams towards each Client, while transmitting information simultaneously. By doing so, the interference between Clients is reduced, and the overall throughput is increased, since multiple Clients can receive data at the same time. With 802.11ax, a similar multiplexing is introduced in the frequency domain, namely OFDMA. With this technique, multiple Clients are assigned with different Resource Units in the available spectrum. By doing so, an 80 MHz channel can be split into multiple Resource Units, so that multiple Clients receive different type of data over the same spectrum, simultaneously. In order to have enough subcarriers to support the requirements of OFDMA, four times as many subcarriers are needed than by the 802.11ac standard. In other words, for 20, 40, 80 and 160 MHz channels, there are 64, 128, 256 and 512 subcarriers in the 802.11ac standard, but 256, 512, 1024 and 2048 subcarriers in the 802.11ax standard. Since the available bandwidths have not changed and the number of subcarriers increases by a factor of 4, the subcarrier spacing is reduced by the same factor, which introduces 4 times longer OFDM symbols: for 802.11ac the duration of an OFDM symbol is 3.2 microseconds, and for 802.11ax it is 12.8 microseconds (both without guard intervals).