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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.

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8×8 MIMO Wi-Fi 6 Range Testing with the Ruckus R730

I wanted to test if the additional MIMO radio chains on a Wi-Fi 6 Access Point improve speed at distance even for a 2×2 MIMO Wi-Fi client like a smartphone. I setup a Ruckus R730 802.11ax Access Point with zonedirector firmware 10.3 using a external power supply for full 8×8 capability on a clear 80Mhz channel at 5Ghz. This is currently the highest capacity Wi-Fi 6 AP on the market.

Next I placed a Samsung Galaxy S10 at my 50 foot indoor test location running a iperf server app. Here are the results I saw an average of 200Mbps throughput with spikes to 230Mbps and lows of 150Mbps.

When we compare this to my test with the EnGenius 4×4 Wi-Fi 6 EWS377AP where we saw a 160Mbps average at the same location we can see those additional radio chains do not go unused. We saw a 40Mbps bump in single client performance with the Ruckus R730! Some of this can be attributed to the beamflex antenna elements I am sure.

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Wi-Fi 6 Access Point Client Speed at Range Testing

To continue with my real world Wi-Fi 6 testing series with the EnGenius EWS377AP I wanted to do some indoor speed at distance tests. I am testing actual throughput using a iperf client on a GbE wired desktop and a iperf server app on the smartphone.

I first tested the Wi-Fi 6 Samsung Galaxy S10e I placed it 50 feet from the EWS377AP the Wi-Fi was passing through several walls furniture etc here are the results. I saw average of 160Mbps with spikes to to 176Mbps. Plenty of throughput to stream netflix at 4k (25Mbps) or do just about anything else over Wi-Fi.

Next I wanted to see the difference with a Wi-Fi 5 client the iPhone Xs. I placed the iPhone in the same position an reran the throughput test. This time we averaged 150Mbps with spikes up to 159Mbps.

So in real world distance testing a Wi-Fi 6 AP / Wi-Fi 6 Client edges out Wi-Fi 6 AP / Wi-Fi 5 client with a gain of ~10Mbps not as drastic as the 200Mbs difference we saw at 5 feet but still an improvement. And as we saw in our Wi-Fi 6 AP vs Wi-Fi 5 AP testing having a Wi-Fi 6 AP like the EnGenius EWS377AP can improve overall speed for all Wi-Fi devices.

To back up the Wi-Fi 6 AP testing I went back and did the same test with a Wi-Fi 5 (802.11ac) AP a 4×4 MIMO Ruckus R720. Here are the are the results at the same location.

First I tested the Wi-Fi 5 client the iPhone Xs I was only able to average about 35Mbps.

Next I tested the Samsung Galaxy S10 the Wi-Fi 6 client this did better at 65Mbps average.

So in conclusion we see a big speed at range improvement with a Wi-Fi 6 AP even with a Wi-Fi 5 client we saw over 100Mbps throughput improvement over a similar Wi-Fi 5 AP!