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What does the spectrum analyzer plot of a Wi-Fi 6 connection look like?

I wanted to see what the channel spectrum looks like for a Wi-Fi 6 connection. So I used my Ekahau sidekick spectrum analyzer to look at a connection between a iPhone 11 pro and a Ruckus 8×8 11ax R730 and here is what I saw.

I ran iPerf to fully load the channel you can see the R730 is on channel 149 @ 80Mhz channel width.

There is no indicator on the iPhone 11 to show a Wi-Fi 6 connection like there is on a Samsung Galaxy S10. However if we look at the client list on the Ruckus Zonedirector we see it is connected at 11ax.

Next I captured a video of the iPhone 11 Pro and Samsung Galaxy S10 both running iPerf servers against different wired clients. You can see the OFDMA Resource Units in action

Lastly I ran the same test again with a 20Mhz channel here is that video zoomed in.

For more information on the Ekahau Sidekick click here

For more information on the Ruckus R730 click here

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The iPhone 11 doesn’t have 5G, and that’s totally fine because it has Wi-Fi 6!

The iPhone 11 specs were just announced and as expected it doesn’t support 5G. While 5G is all the rage right now, the technology is still very much in its infancy don’t expect coverage in anything but the largest city’s until 2021. Furthermore adding 5G to a phone requires bulky antennas and power hungry chipsets and this point.

More importantly all iPhone 11’s support Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax)! Wi-Fi 6 will give the iPhone 11 super fast gigabit speeds while increasing range, speed at range and battery life. See our testing of the Samsung Galaxy S10. Offloading your data from the costly cellular networks to Wi-Fi 6 will always be faster and will not incur a monthly charge per device.

Now to use the iPhone 11 at its full potential you will need Wi-Fi 6 access points. We have been testing several and the EnGenius EWS377AP is very good. For high density situations look at the Ruckus R730 or new R750.

Contact me with any questions about designing your Wi-Fi network to be optimized for Wi-Fi 6.