Huawei Oz To Launch Next-Gen Wi-Fi 6 In June

Chinese telco giant, Huawei, has announced it’s locally launching its Wi-Fi 6 ‘Air Engine’ tech in June, despite being barred from Australia’s 5G network, and US ban over national security concerns.

The news follows reports Google has also cut direct business activity with Huawei, including update access to its Android operating system.

Huawei Australia will launch its Wi-Fi 6 Air Engine tech at the Higher Education and Technology Agenda (THETA) conference in Wollonogong.

The technology seeks to significantly increase connectivity across public high-traffic locations (e.g. educational institutions, retail locations and sports stadiums), leading some commentators to raise security concerns.

Wi-Fi 6 seeks to deliver four times more end-users per access point than existing Wi-Fi, better supporting a surge in IoT smart devices.

Local Huawei enterprise customers will gain access to the near 10Gbps capable Wi-Fi access points by June.

The deployment of Wi-Fi 6 Air Engine technology provides a four-fold increase in available bandwidth for end-users, delivering a total throughput of 9.6Gbps.

Set to significantly transform the educational sector, the tech allows some 400 end-users to be connected concurrently to one Wi-Fi 6 access point.

The extra capacity is said to be critical to the acceleration of virtual reality and augmented reality, whilst also offering lower latency than Wi-Fi 5.

Huawei asserts its Wi-Fi 6 access point ‘AP7060DN’ is the first commercial Wi-Fi 6 product in the industry.

The technology claims to be perfect for large universities and educational institutions, however, some commentators query the strategy’s success in Australia amid international cyber security concerns.

Huawei has continued to rebuff claims it’s products offer national security risks, nor spying links to the Chinese government.

Despite this, the company has been hit by the United States’ executive order banning tech from foreign-made telco equipment deemed to be a security risk.

Further information about Huawei’s Wi-Fi 6 products are available here.