As a successor to the 802.11ac standard, the upcoming 802.11ax will offer 4x the throughput of its predecessor; however, speed is not the only advantage of the tech; 802.11ax will offer better performance in scenarios where a lot of devices are connected at the same time, like in the case of hotspots.

Intel announced that it will be ready to ship 802.11ax chips this year, but according to the WiFi Alliance, mass adoption is not likely to happen before 2019. According to L-Com, “in a recent lab-based trial of technology similar to 802.11ax, Huawei recently hit a max speed of 10.53Gbps, or around 1.4 gigabytes of data transfer per second.”

While the standard is not yet certified, Qualcomm announced the availability of 802.11ax chips as early as February of 2017. With said certification expected to happen in 2019, Intel will be joining the pack with chips getting ready this year (and you’ll probably enjoy the benefits around late 2019, if not 2020).

802.11ax operates in the 5GHz band, and utilizes MIMO-OFDA (multiple-input-multiple-output with orthogonal frequency division multiple access).