When will enterprises adopt the new Wi-Fi 6 standard?

The new wireless standard, Wi-Fi 6, is here -- but it's not. Like most emerging technologies, the Wi-Fi 6 standard has been hyped, but true enterprise adoption could take years. In fact, according to a recent IDC report, Wi-Fi 6 won't be considered mainstream until 2023.

Although that time frame seems far off, enterprises might want to plan for the new standard now and educate themselves on Wi-Fi 6 features, IDC analyst Brandon Butler said. The Wi-Fi 6 standard -- more technically known as 802.11ax -- is the next and natural evolution of wireless technology.

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers has not yet ratified Wi-Fi 6. The organization recently told TechTarget the official release date of the new standard probably won't happen until the middle of 2020, or even later.

Although the standard has not been officially ratified, networking vendors have already started to introduce Wi-Fi 6 products. Broadcom, Intel, Qualcomm and others are making pre-standard Wi-Fi 6 chipsets. Other vendors -- including Aerohive Networks, Aruba Networks and Huawei -- have debuted draft enterprise-grade access points (APs).

By the middle of 2019, Butler said, expect to see even more Wi-Fi 6 products, such as APs, hitting the market. In the second half of 2019, IDC expects enterprises to start adopting those products. Next year, in 2020, expect to see enterprise adoption ramp up even more.

Dense Wi-Fi environments get added boost

Brandon Butler

Enterprise adoption of the latest Wi-Fi standards takes time, Butler said. Previous iterations of Wi-Fi standards have also seen slow adoption. Normally, Wi-Fi standards take two to three years to really hit the market and become the de facto standard.

For example, 802.11ac Wave 2 really just became the standard in the market within the last year, Butler said. Just last year, IDC saw many Wave 1 deployments in the market, even though that standard had been released several years ago.

Early adopters of Wi-Fi 6 will include dense wireless environments, such as large public venues, stadiums and auditoriums, according to IDC. The first vertical markets to adopt the new standard are expected to be higher education institutions, government, hospitality and healthcare.

Wi-Fi 6 will add support for uplink multiuser, multiple input, multiple output, which should help in dense Wi-Fi environments, Butler said. These types of advancements in the new wireless standard should help manage traffic connections to large numbers of clients simultaneously. Wi-Fi 6 APs will be able to talk with multiple users at once for both downlink and uplink traffic, which will serve a better capacity for dense environments.