Downloading the newest Wi-Fi protocols: 802.11ax and 802.11ay explained

“Look, Wi-Fi still kind of sucks,” Jim Salter writes for Ars Technica. “And marketing excesses aside, its worst problems all revolve around airtime distribution among multiple devices.”
“Unlike LTE (the protocol cellular data uses), 802.11 WI-Fi is a protocol with no central management, which leaves all nearby devices duking it out for airtime like angry, unsupervised toddlers,” Salter writes. “There’s only so much you can do to fix this problem without radically overhauling and replacing 802.11 itself—but as new 802.11 protocols emerge, they do their best.”
“Spoiler alert—despite the obvious congruency of 802.11ax and 802.11ay, one isn’t a successor to the other. 802.11ax is the protocol which will succeed 802.11ac as the next mainstream Wi-Fi protocol we all use at home and in coffee shops, hotels, and so forth,” Salter writes. “If you’re into the Wi-Fi Alliance’s new, supposedly simpler marketing, it’s Wi-Fi 6, compared to today’s Wi-Fi 5… assuming we conveniently ignore the Wi-Fi 4 that’s on the 2.4 GHz radio all of our Wi-Fi 5 devices also have.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Yes, it gets even more confusing in the full article.
We continue to use and recommend eero’s 2nd generation Home Wi-Fi System which offers tri-band WiFi radios, simultaneous 2.4GHz, 5.2GHz and 5.8GHz wireless. 2×2 MU-MIMO, Beamforming, and IEEE 802.11a/b/g/n/ac.
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