The iPhone 11 Doesn't Show Wi-Fi Advantages Over the iPhone XS

This year's iPhone models—the iPhone 11, 11 Pro, and 11 Pro Max—are the first with Wi-Fi 6, a new wireless standard that's supposed to greatly extend speed and range. Naturally, I was excited to test them with a new Netgear Wi-Fi 6 router and a gigabit corporate connection. Interestingly, the results show that the biggest thing you can do to improve your iPhone Wi-Fi performance doesn't involve Wi-Fi 6, but a setting you can change on any recent router.

The Test

I tested the iPhone 11, 11 Pro Max, a Samsung Galaxy Note 10+ (which has Wi-Fi 6), and an iPhone XS Max (which doesn't) against a Netgear router that shows 853Mbps throughput. I tested the phones at 5 feet, 50 feet, and 90 feet away from the router. All of the devices dropped the signal a little farther than 90 feet away.

As you can see in the two charts below, the four phones had speeds in a pretty tight band. As I saw in my LTE tests, the iPhone 11 and 11 Pro Max are often slower than the iPhone XS Max, and they have no greater range.

I'd chalk this up to software issues, as the hardware here certainly isn't worse than last year's. Users have been complaining widely about bugs in iOS 13, and I did these tests just before the 13.1.1 OS update came through.

But did you see the scale on the Y axis in those charts? Let's put those speeds on a chart with a single Y axis:

This shows that, by far, the best thing you can do for your Wi-Fi speeds is to switch from 2.4GHz to 5GHz. And although 5GHz has less wall penetration than 2.4GHz, we found that it has greater usable range.

Our test lab is a very crowded 2.4GHz zone; there are lots of networks from surrounding buildings and offices impinging on the three usable channels in the band. With more available channels in the 5GHz band, there's a better chance of finding a free one.

If you live all by yourself in a house in the woods, you'll find better range on 2.4GHz. But the maximum speeds still won't come anywhere near 802.11ac or ax on 5GHz, which just uses much more spectrum for much better bandwidth.

In any case, at least with today's equipment, I don't see Wi-Fi performance as a reason to prefer this year's iPhones. Models back to the iPhone 6 have 802.11ac Wi-Fi, which should offer solid performance.

UWB: The Next iPhone Frontier

There's a mysterious new radio in the new iPhones, but like the Wi-Fi 6 capability, it also doesn't seem to be terribly useful.

UWB, or Ultra Wideband, is—at least in Apple's case—a very low-power, short-range technology that uses frequencies similar to Wi-Fi to locate people and devices with better accuracy than Bluetooth. The idea is that one UWB device can tell exactly where another one is, including in which direction. Bluetooth just knows you're in a 30-foot radius.

Right now, UWB can't be used for any cool new things; it's designed to stop a bad old thing: AirDrop spamming. With two UWB-equipped iPhones, you should see your physically nearest friends, who you're pointing your phone at, first in your AirDrop list.

In practice, I didn't find this to be true. Pointing my phone, or not, at another UWB-based iPhone didn't seem to alter the order of AirDrop devices in any way that made sense; the list was still pretty much a jumble of nearby devices.

UWB may also be the basis of Apple's rumored upcoming Tile-like tracker device, and it has a lot of uses in industry. It's going to be a broad standard; unlike, say, the Lightning port, it'll be featured on non-Apple devices which will be compatible. But it's hard for me to get excited by this new wireless feature at the moment when there's so little to do with it.

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It's for the Future; Where's the Proof?

Apple's new Wi-Fi and UWB features strike me as a lot like its new 5x carrier aggregation LTE features. They look good on paper and may be relevant in the future, but they don't offer any immediate advantage to US consumers now.

On today's LTE and Wi-Fi networks, the new iPhones perform just like last year's. Yes, you'll get advantages over much older iPhones, but you'll get the same advantages with last year's models.

UWB is an interesting new feature, but so far I haven't seen why it's a reason to buy a device. Given that it'll be years until most iPhones have UWB, AirDrop spamming is going to continue for quite a while, and third parties haven't had enough time with the tech to develop new apps for it.

There are reasons to buy the new iPhones over last year's models: brighter screens, more cameras, and faster processors come to mind. But so far, better wireless performance isn't such a reason. If that's what you really want, the 2020 iPhones may be the devices that really deliver.

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