New Wi-Fi 6 Release 2 Standard to Boost Upload Speed and Efficiency

The Wi-Fi Alliance has just taken the wraps off yet another update to the still fairly young 802.11ax (Wi-Fi 6) wireless networking standard which, for marketing purposes, is simply to be called ‘Wi-Fi 6 Release 2‘ and brings with it a couple of key improvements – mostly focused upon boosting upload speeds and power management.

Despite the fact that the Wi-Fi 6 standard is still gradually making its way into more devices, and the latest Wi-Fi 6E update – with support for the new 6GHz band – is hardly even out of the starting blocks, we now also have Wi-Fi 6 Release 2 to think about too.

The evolutionary update adds support for multi-user MIMO (MU-MIMO) on the uplink side of network connections, which should improve upload performance on busy wireless networks with multiple simultaneous users (although it’s unclear by how much). In addition, it introduces three new power management features to improve efficiency. The changes will work across all the 2.4GHz, 5GHz and 6GHz WiFi bands.

As for the power management improvements, you get new low power and sleep mode enhancements – including broadcast target wake time (TWT), extended sleep time, and dynamic multi-user spatial multiplexing power save (SMPS) – enabling power optimization of multiple battery powered devices.

The aforementioned trio of features allows multiple devices to “receive extended sleep periods, allow for specific “wake up” times for transmitting data, and enable dynamic shut off of redundant receive chains to optimize power consumption.” Apparently, these power management features will benefit smart home, smart city, and Industrial IoT (IIoT) environments.

Improvements to WiFi standards are always welcome, although it does tend to take a few years before new standards become widely established in consumer hardware. In this case, many manufacturers have only just started to play around with Wi-Fi 6E, and we suspect that Release 2 may not be quite as easy to market, given its more modest technical improvements.