We're also going to spend some time looking at how unlicensed spectrum is used and the most typical wireless LAN technologies that make use of that unlicensed spectrum. We're going to look at Wi-FI, it's the most typical use, but we're also going to look at some of the new technologies that are coming over the last few years that are also using this unlicensed spectrum. So, we're going to see some of the differences between them. First, let's focus on Wi-FI. Wi-FI is a part of a family. It's a generation of technologies. It started in the late 1990s with the partition of 802.11b. There's been multiple generations: 11ag, 11n, 11ac, and now the industry is working towards 11ax that will see the first type of devices coming up in the market next year. Each generation has given improvements in similar ways that we saw in the cellular technologies used in licensed spectrum. We've had similar type of advancements, generation by generation in the Wi-FI family. In 11ax is poised to provide much better coverage and much better capability in dense environments, it's going to deliver much faster throughputs compared to 11ac or 11n, and with all of that, it's going to deliver much better efficiencies for the network. An additional benefit that 11ax brings is also the extended battery life, which will help mobile users, particularly. In this table, we can see a comparison between all the different generations of Wi-FI technologies and how it has advanced over the years. We saw the first generation of 802.11, the first Wi-FI technology used 2.4 GHz unlicensed bands with a maximum bandwidth of 20 MHz. This could deliver at 2 Mbps. In the second generation, 11b, using similar type of spectrum and characteristics, the capability was to deliver a higher throughput, up to 11 Mbps, was introduced. With 11a, in 2003, we saw that 5 GHz was introduced. So going from 2.4 GHz to 5 GHz spectrum but still using 20 MHz. This brought a big throughput improvement up to 54 Mbps. If we compare that to 11n, very typical, very widely used today, it was introduced in 2009. 11n used both 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz, and it could use up to 40 MHz. In addition to that a new capability came, which was the capability of using different streams, different antennas to deliver much higher throughputs. We can see up to 600 Mbps. With 11ac, which is the last generation that we've seen in the market, spectrum remains the same, 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz but we see channels of up to 160 MHz. We also see many more antennas being used up to eight in the downlink, which brings the maximum peak data rate that can be achieved up to 6.8 Gbps. All these throughputs could also be directed to different users using a multi-user MIMO technology. In the case of 11ac, it could only be delivered in the downlink. But this also meant that certain users that support this capability could receive much better throughput. The next generation that is coming next year, the 802.11ax will improve some of these capabilities. The channel width will still remain up to 160 MHz. The number of antennas will be eight, but the multi-user MIMO capabilities will be greatly increased, supporting up to eight multi-user streams in the downlink and another eight in the uplink. Advancements in other areas also bring an increased peak data rate of up to 10 Gbps.
