How WiFi 6 (REALLY) works --- Is it a SWITCH? Feat. the Clear to Send Podcast

About this video

Chuck brings on Rowell and Francois of the Clear to Send podcast to fact-check his earlier video comparing Wi-Fi 6 to a network switch — a claim that drew Twitter backlash and a response video. Rowell is a network engineer at Stanford University; Francois is an independent Wi-Fi consultant in Ontario, Canada, who also teaches Ekahau design classes. Their verdict: Wi-Fi 6 is not a switch, because wireless is half-duplex over a shared contention medium — closer to a really fast hub. Access points and clients still contend for the medium, transmissions must be acknowledged, and collisions cause retransmissions. MU-MIMO existed before Wi-Fi 6, but it needs physical separation between clients and burns efficiency on sounding packets to locate them, and many clients do not support it. The real advance is OFDMA, borrowed from the cellular world: instead of one client using a whole 20 MHz channel, the channel is subdivided into resource units so multiple clients can transmit at once, like fitting several motorcycles side by side instead of giving one the whole road. That targets high efficiency in dense environments — but only when clients are also Wi-Fi 6; at the Cisco Live NOC, they note, only five of roughly 20,000 connected clients were Wi-Fi 6. Other features covered: uplink MU-MIMO (Wi-Fi 5 had downlink only), 1024-QAM for more speed close to the AP, eight spatial streams (hence routers with many antennas, though most clients support only one or two streams), Target Wake Time to schedule IoT wake-ups and save battery, and BSS coloring — actually numbers, not colors — which lets overlapping networks transmit simultaneously at reduced power, shrinking contention in places like apartment buildings. They caution that 802.11ax was still a draft (ratification expected in 2020), some access points ship with Wi-Fi 6 hardware but features pending in firmware, and ‘capable’ differs from ‘certified.’ For careers, they recommend the vendor-neutral CWNP path (CWNA as the starting certification) before vendor certs, describe Ekahau as the standard design and survey toolset, and say wireless work is fun and can be lucrative.

Key takeaways

• Wi-Fi 6 is not a switch: wireless remains half-duplex on a shared, contended medium, so the experts compare it to a very fast hub.
• OFDMA is the headline improvement — splitting a 20 MHz channel into resource units lets multiple clients use the channel simultaneously instead of one client taking the whole channel.
• Benefits require Wi-Fi 6 clients as well as access points; legacy clients fall back to older behavior, so mixed environments see limited gains.
• Target Wake Time and BSS coloring improve efficiency and battery life and reduce contention between overlapping networks, especially in dense or apartment-style deployments.
• To get into wireless, the guests recommend vendor-neutral CWNP/CWNA fundamentals first, then vendor certifications, with Ekahau as the common design and survey tool.

Episode details: published September 28, 2019 · 1:00:37 long. Summary written by Self Growth Videos from the episode itself. Business results and any income figures mentioned are NetworkChuck’s own claims, shared for education — they are not typical or guaranteed.

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