The global new crown epidemic has affected our lives in many ways. The most prominent point is that the periodic home quarantine orders around the world have changed the way we often use contact. Data from the TeleGeography research and research company shows that in 2020, the average international Internet traffic has increased by 48%, and the peak traffic has increased by 47%. It remains to be seen whether these figures will return to the state before the new crown epidemic or will become the new normal. Tony Testa will discuss this new virtual environment with you, and analyze how manufacturers such as Qorvo develop solutions from a Wi-Fi perspective to help people adapt to the new environment.
Q: Tony, how has the Wi-Fi environment changed since the outbreak of the new crown epidemic?
A: Since the outbreak of the epidemic, everyone has experienced changes in work or school environment. With the increasing number of online users, we have discovered a large number of new use cases, such as workday home Wi-Fi, retail routers, service operator deployments, and enterprise Wi-Fi 6 upgrade investments aimed at expanding client capacity. Similarly, applications for work from home (WFH), online education, Zoom music courses/extracurricular activities, and medical appointments/conferences have become more popular.
In the early days of the outbreak, many people knew that their home network did not meet the standard for increasing usage. If the whole family is online at the same time, the current coverage and speed cannot provide the best online experience. There is an urgent need to increase the network speed of individual users and build a home mesh (one pod per room) network instead of sharing a router for the whole family. This situation is happening all over the world.
To this end, companies such as Qorvo have launched a new generation of Wi-Fi 6/6E products. By providing products that further improve network speed and capacity, these next-generation technologies will be able to meet the needs of individual users in the home network. With the advent of 6E, using more bandwidth in the 6 GHz frequency range can help increase network capacity. Wi-Fi 6/6E can also provide the same experience for more users on the same network. In addition, Wi-Fi 6 will achieve a network speed of 1.2 Gbps, while Wi-Fi 6E will achieve a theoretical speed of 5.4 Gbps to 10 Gbps, which is a huge improvement over Wi-Fi 5 and Wi-Fi 6.
Q: Can you talk about the three-band Wi-Fi option and how can it help us cope with the network capacity challenge?
A: For many years, since the 802.11n or Wi-Fi 4 standards, gateways have been dual-band (ie 2.4 Ghz and 5 GHz). Like tri-band Wi-Fi, dual-band is used to increase user density, speed, and capacity. Increasing the 5 GHz frequency band helps to reduce the load of the 2.4 GHz frequency band, which is heavily saturated and susceptible to interference. Our cordless phones, Bluetooth, and microwave appliances all operate in the 2.4 GHz frequency band.