80211axWiFi

802.11ax, commercially marketed as Wi-Fi 6, is a wireless local area network standard in the IEEE 802.11 family. Published in 2019, it succeeds 802.11ac (Wi-Fi 5) and is designed to improve efficiency, capacity, and performance in dense environments such as apartments, offices, and public venues.

Its core technologies include orthogonal frequency-division multiple access (OFDMA) to serve multiple users simultaneously, improved multi-user MIMO for downlink and uplink, and higher-order modulation up to 1024-QAM. Other features include Target Wake Time (TWT) to extend device battery life, enhanced basic service set (BSS) coloring to reduce interference, and improved spatial reuse and scheduling.

802.11ax operates in the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands, with Wi-Fi 6E extending to the 6 GHz band. The standard provides a theoretical maximum data rate up to 9.6 Gbps across multiple streams, but real-world speeds depend on device capabilities, channel conditions, and network congestion.

It is designed to be backward compatible with existing 802.11 devices; legacy devices can connect to 802.11ax access points but do not benefit from OFDMA or other new features unless they also support them. Since its introduction, 802.11ax has become common in consumer routers, laptops, smartphones, and enterprise equipment, and is often marketed as part of Wi-Fi 6 deployments.

A successor development path includes 802.11be (Wi-Fi 7), which aims to further increase speeds and efficiency through enhancements to OFDMA, MU-MIMO, and wider channel use.