Today’s standard of 802.11ac was only approved back in January of 2014, is still trying to make its way into households around the world. However, 802.11ax is the next wireless standard that could see speeds up to 10Gbps.

802.11ax is the new standard that the Wi-Fi Alliance is looking at which lab tests have shown can hit speeds slight over 10.53Gbps which equates to 1.4 gigabytes of data per second! This means you could download a 4.5Gb ISO image in less than 3.5 seconds!

With such fast speeds, we run into limitations of our existing technologies within our mobile phones, desktop computers, and even Internet pipelines. For example, most smart phones can only read data from its internal memory at around 80MB/sec and write around 20MB/sec. FAR slower than what could be delivered over 802.11ax standards.

Desktops running SSD’s could take advantage of the faster speeds but then you have to turn to your ISP to find out what sort of pipeline they are capable of delivering to you. We know Comcast is looking at 2Gbps connections and Google Fiber is rolling out in a lot of cities but these speeds are on a fraction of what 802.11ax can handle. Chattanooga Electric Power Board said its planning to upgrade all of its city 1Gbps lines to 10Gbps, so perhaps the good folks in Tennessee could at least take advantage of 802.11ax but we are still far from having the required pipelines across the country to see any “Internet” advantage to having 802.11ax.

Internet speeds aside this new technology will blossom as other technologies catch up over the next couple of years. If you have 802.11ax in your home, how would you use its speeds?