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With the release of the new M1 Macbook Air, the final stages of the Wi-Fi 6 transition begin for Apple. Today the iPad Pro, iPad Air, iPhone 11, iPhone 12, MacBook Air M1, and MacBook Pro M1 all support Wi-Fi 6. iPad, iPad mini and not all low-cost Intel Macs are supported.
About Apple @ Work: Bradley Chambers has been managing a corporate IT network since 2009. With his experience in deploying and managing firewalls, switches, a mobile device management system, professional Wi-Fi, of hundreds of Macs and hundreds of iPads, Bradley will highlight the ways in which Apple IT managers deploy Apple devices, create networks to support them, train users, stories from the trenches of the IT management and ways in which Apple could improve its products for IT services.
Wi-Fi 6 brings several vital elements to corporate and K-12 Wi-Fi networks and addresses some critical Wi-Fi connectivity issues. One of the main ones is increasing the capacity of environments with many devices. Setting up a basic Wi-Fi connection in your home is relatively straightforward. Unless you live in a multi-unit building, this is one thing you can’t really screw up.
Designing Wi-Fi for an environment with potentially hundreds or even thousands of connections is a whole other process. You need to be concerned about same-channel interference, device roaming, complex security issues, and other complex issues.
One of the biggest challenges right now is capacity design. OFDMA is one of the newer technologies in Wi-Fi 6. A 20 MHz channel can be divided into nine smaller channels in Wi-Fi 6. Using OFDMA, an access point can simultaneously transmit small frames. to nine Fi 6 compatible clients.
One thing to remember is that Wi-Fi 6 brings back support for 2.4 GHz, while 802.11ac was only compatible with 5 GHz. I prefer the 5 GHz band (a minimum of 19 channels without overlap versus 3 for 2.4 GHz); 2.4 GHz is still popular because of its low cost and battery life.
Network providers have been touting Wi-Fi 6 for years, but we’re now at a point where Wi-Fi 6 should be your default choice for Apple deployments. I know many organizations have been keen to support Wi-Fi 6 when the Mac lacked support. We’ve finally reached the perfect time when the Mac is finally seeing the transition to Wi-Fi 6, and the iPad lineup is almost completely migrated to Wi-Fi 6. While older iPhones have been hanging around for years, we are now in all the latest iPhones that support Wi-Fi 6. It’s safe to say you will see many more Wi-Fi 6 enabled devices on your network next year.
Vendors like Ubiquiti are now launching their Wi-Fi 6 hotspots where companies like Extreme have been selling them for a few years now. Even though a technology like Wi-Fi6e seems imminent, new communication technologies tend to have a lot of news early in their development cycle. It takes years for technology to mature and even more for devices to add support.
With the Mac and Wi-Fi 6, we’re at a point where the technology is mature enough that its price drops significantly. The underlying code powering the access points has matured and also eliminated early bugs. Support for client devices is also quite common now. I say all of this to say that now is the time when Wi-Fi 6 at be the default choice for corporate and K-12 networks. If you think of device deployments as a five-year project, Wi-Fi 6 in 2020 is the only appropriate wireless decision. There is no reason to deploy an 802.11ac network or wait for Wi-Fi 6th.
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