Feature IEEE 802.11ax-2021 (more commonly known as IEEE 802.11ax or, more familiarly "Wi-Fi 6") was approved on 9 February 2021, with a top speed of 1.2Gbit/sec per single stream (think "stream" as synonymous with "channel"). As seems to happen each time a new Wi-Fi technology comes out, people are yet again asking whether this is the one that will finally tip us over the edge and entice us away from cables and onto wireless.
I'm going to stick my neck out and ask a slightly different question, and explore whether we're ever going to move our worlds to dispose with wires.
First of all, let's not get bogged down with the potential of moving the server room and the data centre into a wireless world: that's simply not going to happen, ever. In the average server room or data centre that uses physical servers, each box will have at least a pair of Gigabit Ethernet connections linked redundantly into the switch infrastructure. Gigabit Ethernet is full-duplex (strictly speaking the original spec included half-duplex, but it never really went anywhere) and so as long as the devices at each end can keep up, you get pretty much a gigabit constantly (and I say "pretty much" only because you have to allow for the bits of the Ethernet frames that aren't the data payload, such as the headers).Continue reading