Engineers agreed to start work in May on a next-generation Wi-Fi standard that could provide up to a four-fold boost in throughput. The Extreme High Throughput (EHT) spec may be the first designed from the start to include support for the 6 GHz band and to put Wi-Fi standards on an accelerated release cadence.
Developers hope the 6 GHz band is cleared by 2020 for unlicensed use that would include both Wi-Fi and cellular. Wi-Fi proponents aim to retrofit 802.11ax for 6 GHz by that time and have an enhanced 6 GHz implementation available with EHT by 2023.
The EHT initiative comes on the heels of disappointment over the longer than expected time it took to finish the latest Wi-Fi upgrade. The .11ax spec, just now coming to market in pre-standard versions, took more than four years to finish, one of the longest 802.11 projects to date.