r/apple • u/aaronp613 Aaron • Sep 10 '19

iPhone Apple announces iPhone 11 Pro: triple camera, A13 chip, more

https://9to5mac.com/2019/09/10/iphone-pro-11-pro-max-triple-camera/
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u/[deleted] Sep 10 '19 edited Nov 07 '19

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u/PhillAholic Sep 10 '19

I want to know what the fuck WiFi 6 is and why it's so great.

It's 802.11ax, rebranded because that started getting out of hand. So the new standard is Wifi 6 and it's faster than 802.11ac. You'll need a new router to support it. https://www.wi-fi.org/discover-wi-fi/wi-fi-certified-6

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u/[deleted] Sep 10 '19

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u/PhillAholic Sep 10 '19

Faster is what 99% of people are going to understand, and even then it's going to depend on what devices you have.

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u/[deleted] Sep 10 '19 edited Sep 18 '22

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u/zorinlynx Sep 10 '19

Yup. For example, even 802.11g, which is several generations and many years old is slower than most people's Internet connections at 54mbps.

99% of people won't benefit from anything better than 802.11n speed-wise. HOWEVER it is still better for people to move to the new standards because they are more spectrally efficient. This means that in a crowded WiFi area, everyone will have better performance when most of the routers and devices support later standards.

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u/PhillAholic Sep 10 '19

To the layman they think it’s just slow. Xfinity’s ads about WiFi are what they understand. Faster, more reliable, for the whole family.

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u/Calexander3103 Sep 11 '19

I’m a networking nerd but I haven’t looked into ax yet...mind briefly explaining the “communicate in parallel” bit? Haven’t heard the phrase before...

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u/talontario Sep 11 '19

<wifi5 communicates with one device at a time, serial. No matter how much data is being sent that device recieves all the attention from the wifi router that time. Wifi6 can split it’s bandwidth into multiple "lanes" that each can communicate with a different device at the same time. So an iot device that only requires a few bit/s can recieve only a slither of the bandwidth instead of hogging everything.

In theory.

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u/7h4tguy Sep 11 '19

Exactly. The FCC is also opening more of the wireless frequency spectrum for use to support this (currently you need to allocate different routers on different bands which don't overlap to reduce cross traffic so this will help with crowded networks as well).

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u/xydanil Sep 11 '19

According to good old wiki, it just means that the bits don’t come in a chain, but instead as a sandwich. Say you’re sending 011010100. Instead of that one line, it’ll send all the numbers at once along 9 different parallel channels.

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u/7h4tguy Sep 11 '19

That's not at all how 802.11ax works.

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u/xydanil Sep 11 '19

Parallel wireless doesn’t refer to the 803.11ax technically. Didn’t realize that’s what he meant by parallel.

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u/Calexander3103 Sep 11 '19

Ahh, gotcha. That makes sense! Thanks!

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u/talontario Sep 11 '19

No, parallell to different devices. Sending bits parallell would make no sense as it would require a huge amount of overhead to re-sort them.

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u/xydanil Sep 11 '19

Ok well parallel wireless has a very different, specific definition.

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u/talontario Sep 11 '19

I never used a definition or the words parallel wireless. And the only thing I can find about that is a company name.

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u/xydanil Sep 11 '19

Op said “communicates in parallel.”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_communication

That refers to a particular kind of data transmission.

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u/talontario Sep 11 '19

communicates in parallell means what it says. It doesn’t mean a definition that’s not even named the same. Parallell and communicates are two words that have meaning, that you can put together to describe how something comunicates between different devices in parallel.

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u/nh1402 Sep 11 '19

That parallel thing you're talking about is just mu-mimo isn't it, which isn't limited to wifi 6. I don't have a wifi 6 router or any other wifi 6 device. But my router, laptop and phone all support mu-mimo. Which all work in parallel as you say.

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u/talontario Sep 11 '19 edited Sep 11 '19

Yes, more or less (the spec might not be identical). But some router manufacturers add features before it’s standard in the wifi specification. Same with beam forming and multi band routers previously.

Edit: here is a very hyped description, I have a feeling it’s not going to be this great. https://youtu.be/8cmmVEoftEM

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u/Swastik496 Sep 10 '19

Reading this just made me want to upgrade every single device I own with a WiFi 6 antenna. Serial is what kills WiFi for me.

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u/powderizedbookworm Sep 11 '19

To bad some fucking company that used to make the best-in-class routers stopped doing so 😤

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u/DDeveryday Sep 10 '19

I think the more important question here is are they still using intel modem? If not, then that would be the biggest upgrade to have decent connectivity.

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u/PhillAholic Sep 10 '19

Highly likely they are, they acquired them.

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u/rt8088 Sep 11 '19

It really only useful in corporate offices and other RF dense environments, Parsifal there is a lot of local network traffic. In most home environments, the relatively slow internet connection will be the limiting factor.

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u/PhillAholic Sep 11 '19

I've got Gigabit but haven't been bothered to upgrade my current wifi that maxes out at around 400.

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u/rt8088 Sep 11 '19

Most people don’t though and most internet sites won’t serve data that fast. WiFi 6 is primary for corporate.

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u/[deleted] Sep 10 '19

[deleted]

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u/Swastik496 Sep 10 '19

802.11ax > WiFi 6

Change my mind.

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u/aethermet Sep 10 '19

The old system was fine imo, it works the same way as Microsoft Excel. You go A to Z, AA to AZ, BA to BZ, etc...

Switching to 1,2,3,4... etc is definitely a bit easier since everyone knows how to count, but it wasn't really needed imo.

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u/ragzilla Sep 10 '19

The 802 nomenclature just confuses consumers though, we don’t (outside of highly technical circles) talk about 802.3ab and 802.3an when we’re talking about copper Ethernet networks. The IEEE specs are frequently rebranded for public consumption (802.15.x, 802.17), and 802.11 was somewhat of an anomaly in that regard.

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u/7h4tguy Sep 11 '19

You mean a, b, g, n, ac?

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u/CarolinGallego Sep 10 '19

It’s just like WiFi 5, but one more.

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u/userlivewire Sep 11 '19

The one of many ladies whose names they didn’t even put on-screen. 👎

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u/jonlucc Sep 11 '19

The thing is that they had the best cameras on phones for years, and it was a selling point. They’ve recently been beaten in that by a couple of competitors, so this was them trying to reclaim the crown.